Those Graces
by lucyspencer
Summary: Scenes of Olivia's life post-Surrender Benson. Warnings: second person POV, references to violence, and general unhappiness. A bit of Olivia/Cassidy, a bit of Olivia/Elliot. *Updated with a part 7 as of 6/30/14.*
1. Chapter 1

_when he sucks you deep sometimes you're nothing but meat_

The nurse at the hospital asks if there's anyone you want to call. Mother? Sister? Friend? When you've shot down all three choices, she asks if you want to talk to the social worker.

You do not. Her name is Janet, she is from the west coast, and she has worked here eight months. You know this because you were the one they called in to train her. Irony at its finest.

You tell the nurse no, it's not necessary, can we please just do this. She looks down at her clipboard and she says that she's required to read all this legal information to patients but given the circumstances, maybe she'll just skip it. Or I could recite it to myself, you think, and the whole thing seems so absurd that you have to stifle an inappropriate urge to laugh.

The nurse's name is Danielle. You are on a first name basis with her, just like you are with all five other people that come in and out of that small room off to the side of the ER, and it is the most exquisitely awkward reunion possible for everyone involved. Cruelly familiar, like a well rehearsed play where you've been removed from your role without notice, but fortunately you know the script well enough to play any part flawlessly. You can be the perfect victim, the perfect witness, because you've never done anything by half measures and that's sure as hell not going to change now. Not even when the florescent lights are so bright and you just want to close your eyes, just for a moment, but they all_ know you_ and now they know you_ like this_ and you can't let them down by making this any harder than it has to be.

While you stick to your lines, everyone else has some catching up to do to get on your level. They try, and you couldn't be more thankful for their composure in this sick fucking nightmare of a situation, but no one is able to keep the horror out of their voice when they tell you they are so, so sorry. They are all so sorry and there's nothing you can say back that will even begin to tell them what you're feeling so you just bite your cracked lower lip and nod.

You are so very tired.

_on days like this it starts me thinking_

Brian was hovering. There was no other way to put it. The first two days home from the hospital were a haze, in and out of a dreamless sleep, but after forty eight hours you have pulled yourself together enough to realize that he is right there. All the fucking time.

"You need to go back to work," you announce to him, and he opens his mouth to protest but catches himself before he starts to speak. You know best, he agrees, and you wait a beat but there is nothing to argue. Huh. You had expected him to fight you on that, and now you don't know if you should thank him for understanding or punch him in the face for assuming any little disagreement would cause you to shatter. "But only because I've pulled some strings and they're moving me to daytime for a month," he says, and it is enough to stave off any punching fantasies for the time being.

Besides, you're not completely alone. You had broken character only once in your otherwise flawless hospital performance, when you had gotten up to head into the bathroom and suddenly felt like your legs were about to give way. Brian had reached out to steady you, and before you could even stop to think you had very nearly decked him. Word somehow spread, the way good news always does, because a doctor came by a little later to ever so carefully remind you that you were going to need help with a lot of things, not least of all tending to the assortment of wounds you could barely reach. He cleared his throat a few times before continuing, obviously as happy as you were to be having this conversation. "Maybe it would be best if you had a nurse stopping by to help you out." A female, he added pointedly. You narrowed your eyes at him, wishing he would just fucking say what you knew you were both thinking, but there was really no acceptable alternative to his proposal. He had you there and he knew it.

Enter Alice. She was a refreshingly no-nonsense woman, and if she felt pity or shock or horror when she saw you, she never let it show. She let you handle everything you were physically capable of on your own so you didn't feel so helpless, warned you that 'I won't lie, this will hurt like a son of a bitch' without the slightest doubt in her voice as to whether you could handle it, and most importantly she never, ever asked if you 'wanted to talk'. Thank God for Alice, you thought. If only everyone in your life would just take their cues from her script.

Socorro was the Brazilian cleaning lady who came every afternoon. Brian claimed she had worked for him for a year, and you highly, highly doubted any story of his that began with 'So I have a cleaning lady,' but you hadn't been able to force the truth from him yet and Socorro conveniently didn't speak enough English to confess what he was really putting her up to. In the only language the two of you shared, a combo of broken Spanish and hand gestures, you tried to explain to her that you really didn't need a babysitter. She just shrugged her shoulders, making the 'I can't hear you' sign and going back to doing whatever it was that she did every day, which seemed to consist of moving things in the living room from one pile to another. She never asked how you got into your current state, but she didn't act like she was particularly bothered by it either, and you told yourself that was the only reason you allowed her to stay. Because honestly, you were fine.

Honestly.

_I shaved every place where you've been, boy_

You don't shower any more. Not since the night of the impulsive haircut, when afterward you undressed and stood in front of the mirror, forcing yourself to look for the first time. You mentally catalogued your injuries, confirming what you already knew from the grim frowns on the faces of every fucking person who got to see the whole disgusting mess for themselves at the hospital. No more. Now you fill the bathtub up as far as possible before gingerly sinking down into the water, letting it blanket everything from the neck down.

Brian is amused by this ritual. He doesn't know. He hasn't seen.

By some miracle, both your legs are almost completely unmarred below the knee. Every night you lift them up out of the water one at a time, quietly marveling at the sight. The skin is pale and smooth and you take your time shaving, so careful not to miss a spot even if it means contorting yourself into a position that leaves you almost breathless from the pain. Then you watch your toes, the way they can bend and flex freely in a way that nothing else can right now, and it's something so beautiful and sacred and _normal_ that tears prick at the back of your eyes every time.

Socorro sits at the kitchen counter during her so called lunch break and turns her fingernails into blue-green-grey works of art. Brian says she worked at a salon back in Bahia, at least until she hired a coyote to take her across the border and escape an abusive husband. You wonder if she truly feels safe now, if there are some things in life that you can never really run far enough to free yourself from. When you see the concentration with which she wields the brush, you get it, the need for that one tiny something that stays the same when nothing else will ever be quite the same again. "Linda," you comment, and she looks up from her masterpiece and beams.

One day you let her paint your toenails cherry red. It is an understatement to say this is not your color, but it is something bright and new and when you see your perfect toes reflected in the water, you smile.

_Can't forget the things you never said_

It arrives innocently enough, white and yellow daisies in a carefully neutral container, but you inhale sharply and your eyes narrow as you pick up the offending item. "Don't fuck with me," you mutter to it in warning. You rip the card out of the tiny envelope and your suspicions are confirmed. '-E' is all it said, apparently all he could summon the balls to come up with after a couple of years to work on it. Flower child, you hear in your head, a nickname he had given you years ago after he got his hands on an unfortunate old photo of you at some ridiculous themed sorority party, daisies stuck in your hair. Flower child. You can hear it clearly despite the time that's passed, can see him smirking at you over the computer monitor, just trying to irritate you enough to break up the monotony of those days that consisted of nothing but slogging through endless piles of paperwork.

How the hell did he get your address, you wonder, and you can see that goddamn smirk again and hear him make some crack about how he may have given up the badge, but they let him keep the detective skills. Fuck that. He didn't get to be cute with you. He didn't get to choose now, of all times, to shove his way back into your life with private jokes and flowers and one fucking capital letter, as if...as if what? What were you supposed to do, call and ask if whatever lies- because that's all they were- whatever goddamn lies about you he had blustered his way into finding had made him decide all of a sudden that _you wouldn't survive without him?_ No. No way.

"Don't FUCK with me!" you repeat, but this time you're shouting, you're throwing the planter across the room and listening to it shatter, and soon you've smashed everything in the sink but it's still not enough and it's just not going to be.

_he likes killing you after you've died_

Food starts showing up in the apartment, bags and containers from pretty much every restaurant on the eastern seaboard that delivers. You are puzzled. Brian explains that 'in polite society, when something happens and people don't know what the hell else to do, they send food.'

You mimic kicking him in the shins with your perfect toes because really, he's the one telling you about polite society? "But it's unnecessary. There are two fully capable people living here, it's not like we can't-"

"They're trying to *help*. And when people don't know what to do, they go back to basic instincts. Food, sex, oxygen- food just happens to be the only one you can have delivered to your door. Legally," he adds.

You still don't get it, but that doesn't stop the food from coming. Unluckily for you, the smell of all but the blandest of things sends you dry heaving- but at least everyone else who comes through your door eats very well. Silver linings and all that. You keep crackers or some other bearable item within arms reach at all times and hope that it keeps anyone from noticing that you never actually eat any of it.

You don't sleep much more than you eat, at least not since you started dreaming. The doctor tried to push sleeping pills on you, but you refused. Not when you can barely stomach the painkillers as it is. They are an orange liquid, thick and sticky sweet and you know that had to be all Brian's suggestion but you still don't have the words to thank him.

He is trying so hard. You know he must be tired of getting up with you half a dozen times a night because you start screaming or crying or hitting your head against the wall- thank God that last one only happened once. Your dreams are crowded, full of your parents and suspects that walked and everyone else who has ever wronged you, and you put them all in their place but at the end it always comes down to you and *him*. You can feel the coldness of the gun against the back of your neck and hear his voice next to your ear and oh god this cannot be happening again I'm not going to make it out this time and not that, nonono just anything but not that...

Then you're jolted awake again, and you race into the bathroom to throw up and cry and hyperventilate until your body just gives out. Brian's waiting outside the locked door, not saying a word, until you come out and then he patiently follows you back to bed so you can do it all over again.

By morning you are exhausted.

Being touched is still barely tolerable. Alice says things are getting better, and day by day she points out the signs that you're starting to heal. On the surface, at least. There are still some deeper burns that bring tears to your eyes if you so much as brush them with your fingertips, but you know it'll be a long process. Time and a good plastic surgeon will take away the worst of it, one of the doctors had told you- as if 'the worst' of what you had been through was something that could be repaired by a skin graft. You could have slapped him right then. You probably should have.

You instinctively tense up if anyone gets too close to you. Alice knows this, and she is careful to announce her every move before it happens. You lie and say it's not really necessary, but she shrugs you off and refuses, asking how else you're ever going to manage on your own if she doesn't walk you through it step by step. Once again, thank God for Alice. You could just hug her- well, someday.

Things with Brian are a process. You hold his hand at night, the only form of physical affection you can consistently tolerate. He reaches his arm out from his side of the bed and you clasp hands as he promises you that you can do this. It does nothing to keep the nightmares away, but you can't imagine ever even falling asleep in the first place without the feeling of your fingers intertwined with his.

In the evening you sit on opposite ends of the couch and he flips channels on the TV while you pretend to read, as if you actually have the mental focus to do something like that. Subconsciously at first, you start shifting closer to him day by day until one night you look over at each other and realize you have made it all the way to the middle. He grins but says nothing, and from that point on it becomes a bit of a game, inch by inch until finally one evening you're dozing off with your head leaning against his shoulder.

Yesterday afternoon you made out like sexually frustrated teenagers for at least an hour. You tried to pull away at first because you know this is as far as it's going to go and you're probably driving the poor guy insane, but he knows exactly what you're doing without you having to say a word and he's not having it. "S'okay, Liv, that's what I've got my right hand for." Charming, hon. You roll your eyes but you don't stop, and it's a strictly above the shoulders affair but it's so nice for once to feel like a normal human being and not a walking trauma case.

Still, you're not that disappointed when the phone finally interrupts, forcing him back to the courthouse for the rest of the afternoon. It was enough for one day, and after he leaves you lie back down on the couch and smile, eyes closed as the breeze from an open window brushes over your face. It's progress.

_at least when you cry now he can't even hear you_

Brian knocks in your predetermined pattern, the 'code' that had been invented to warn you who was at the door, before walking in and dropping his keys on the table. You shiver at the clanking sound. He sits down on the other side of the couch with coffee in hand and turns to look at you expectantly. "Hi."

He does this all the time, like maybe he thinks this is the moment you're going to have some big breakthrough. It's not. "They still haven't found that plane," you say with a nod toward the TV.

You are rewarded with a loud sigh as he gets up and walks away. "You know, Socorro saw a couple of pieces of glass on the floor the other day." Damn. Sweeping with only one good hand was harder than you thought.

"I dropped a glass. I thought I got it all."

"Well, you must have dropped at least three, because the pieces were different colors."

"So now you have an informant? Good job, officer."

You know you are being a flat-out bitch, that there can't be anyone on earth more difficult to try and take care of than you. The man is a living saint. You have seen over the years that it's not just the victim who suffers, that it affects everyone around them in their own way. You know all these things, you're the fucking expert, but all your remaining rationality went to shit when you got the call from Barba earlier that morning. He has been your angel in a designer suit for the last few weeks, dealing with one ridiculous ploy after another from Lewis and his lawyer, and today it was a demand that the judge overturn the order that kept them from being able to make copies of your medical records and the statement you gave at the hospital. Neither of you were under any illusions as to his motive. It would take about thirty fucking seconds for the whole thing to be 'accidentally' leaked to the media, whether it harmed his case or not, because that's not what this is about. He wasn't worried about going to prison, not when he'd walked so many times before. For him, this was all a grand opportunity to continue the torment he had already started.

Barba thought the judge was on your side for this one. But you still need to prepare yourself for the likelihood of an open court, he warned. He was doing his damnedest to keep it closed but they were pushing back hard on that one. Of course they were. Open court meant a chance for him to display his handiwork to the world, to force you to recount every little detail while he looked on. You were sure he would be delighted to take the stand himself just in case he felt you hadn't been explicit enough or humiliated enough. He was probably getting off on the anticipation right then, that fucking bastard piece of shit...

You had cut the call short, stumbling and bumping into one side of the wall and then another until you collapsed onto the bed. The room seemed to be spinning around you and everything was on fire. Your whole body was shaking uncontrollably, one leg trembling so violently that you would actually be limping for two days afterward, and it felt like electric shocks over and over again.

The logical thing to do would be to clue in your poor long suffering boyfriend, but you're frustrated and he's frustrated and you've already had one breakdown today, so you pretend to ignore him as he leans against the dining room table and talks to the back of your head. Yeah, yeah. You are the world's most emotionally shut off person, you can't admit when you need help, and you push away anyone who dares to try and get close to you. You've got everything bottled up inside and it's not healthy, you keep pretending everything is fine and it's not. You're not fine.

You press your lips together in a thin line and hold back from saying that you know all this already, this is what you pay your therapist for. He doesn't seem to get it, the difference between 'can't' and 'don't want to'. You want to, and it's not even stubbornness that's holding you back anymore.

It's the fear that once you start, you won't be able to stop.

He mumbles something to himself and you can't understand what he's saying but the exhaustion in his voice needs no explanation. "You know. If it weren't for listening to you talk in your sleep, I *really* wouldn't have a clue what's going on with you."

You had no idea. "And what the hell am I saying, exactly?"

He rubs his eyes again. "That's not my point, Liv, the point is-" and you're not hearing what his point is because the blood is draining from your face and your heartbeat seems to be pounding in your head and all you can think of is what does he know, oh god what did I say, maybe he knows everything and he's known all along and fuckfuckfuck how dare your subconscious betray you like that?

You can't breathe. "I'm not having this conversation with you. Just...you're going to be late for work. Just go. Just leave me alone. Please."

He walks back into the kitchen and you storm down the hall- well, as much as you can storm in your present condition- slamming the bathroom door behind you. You know you are making him feel like an asshole and you know he doesn't deserve it and you know you are being completely childish, but right now you Don't. Fucking. Care.

A few minutes later you hear him knock quietly. "I'll be back at eleven," he says through the closed door. "Just...shit. I'll have my phone on me, call if you-" He paused. "Yeah. See you later."

Silence.

_back on the street now_

You're in a park, that's all you know. Most likely somewhere in New Jersey. You had gotten into the car without a plan, steering erratically with your one good arm and being a general menace to the fine motorists of the city, losing track of how many of them had flipped you off after number seventeen. Maybe you returned the gesture, you don't remember. You just kept driving until Manhattan had long ago faded into the rearview mirror and you ended up here, which seemed as good of a place as any to turn the car off, let your head fall against the steering wheel, and scream with everything you have. You scream and swear and hit the dashboard and sob as loudly as you want to until your throat is raw and you just don't have the strength anymore, and then you take a deep shuddering breath before pulling out your phone to find the way home.

Whether you feel better or worse now, you're not sure.

You are so very tired.

Back at the empty apartment once again, you reach for your phone and dial, swallowing hard and tilting your head back because you are so fucking done with crying for today. When the voice on the other end answers, you have to interrupt to keep from losing your nerve. "Yeah. I...no, no, listen. Shut up and just...no. Not over the phone. Just get here now." A breath. "Please. I need you here."


	2. Brilliant Disguise

A/N: Well, I didn't really know if I was going to leave the last one as a standalone, but I left it open in case I decided to continue...which I guess I did! Once again, this part might be the end, but I have a feeling it won't be. Quotes in italics taken from Beautiful Disguise by Bruce Springsteen.

_So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes_

_is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?_

He arrived so quickly that you wondered if he had commandeered a squad car. Which was for the best, maybe, because it didn't give you enough time to really think about what the hell you just did. On the other hand, you really could have used the chance to make yourself a bit more presentable. Elliot had seen you looking pretty damn bad before, but this was a momentous occasion of sorts and you felt like it really called for more than greeting him while barefoot and sans makeup to hide your puffy red eyes.

Even as you opened the door, you weren't sure how you'd react. You had envisioned so many scenarios over the years- sometimes you slapped him, sometimes you hugged him, sometimes you did both. Sometimes you grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him with everything you had in you.

You never imagined standing at the door mutely while he frowned, giving his surroundings the once-over. "Whose place is this?"

Figures. Years go by and yet it took less than a second for him to start grilling you on your personal life. It had to be some sort of record. "Brian's," you said, gesturing for him to come inside before you changed your mind and left him out in the hallway.

"Cassidy? That idiot?"

You decided you weren't even going to try and respond as he made himself comfortable on the couch. Time to get straight to the point. "I got the flowers. I don't appreciate you trying to contact me like that. There's enough shit in my life right now without whatever game you're trying to play."

"So you called me to come over so you could tell me to leave you alone. I see."

"No. I mean, yes. I wanted to tell you that and I didn't think it was appropriate over the phone. Some things people deserve to hear face to face." His expression didn't change but you still knew that had to be a punch in the gut. Perfect.

"Liv. Listen, I-"

You shook your head so sharply it hurt, telling him that you didn't want to hear it, explanations or apologies or whatever he was about to offer up. You had spent so long grieving over his disappearance and now you just didn't have the energy to dredge all those feelings up again. Someday, maybe, but not right then. "I wasn't even planning on calling you, but..."

"You didn't want to be alone and I'm the only person you know who wouldn't ask you if you wanted to talk about it," he said, saving you from having to say it yourself.

You gave him a sad little smile. "Apparently I shut people out, can you believe that?"

"You? Nah," he scoffed.

"That's what I thought too."

You chatted about safe topics, his kids and your hair color and where that damn plane could have gone, ignoring that there were enough elephants in the room for a fucking circus. It wasn't that you had suddenly forgiven him- actually, you wanted to strangle him just as much as you ever had. What he did had hurt you deeply, the kind of hurt that sinks into your bones and takes a little piece of your soul with it. You weren't a stranger to that kind of pain. But. You just never expected it from _him._

But that wasn't what you were thinking about when you were lying on the floor of that godawful beach house, wondering if you would still be alive by the time help came- or if you even wanted to keep living when you knew everything that you would have to endure in the days and weeks and lifetime to come. You closed your eyes and saw him looking back at you, and in that moment all you wanted was just one more time. Just a chance to sit across the table from him in some dive of a bar drinking watery beer with the closest person you'd ever had to a brother. They say that when you're about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. If that was the truth, your life apparently came down to one person. Go figure.

That one person was doing a remarkable job of restraining himself from what you knew he was dying to do, which was demand to know what really happened with that motherfucker and then go tear him apart using any and all available means. At the very least, he was obviously wanting to put his fist through the wall. However, your friendship was built not on knowing what to do, but rather knowing what _not_ to do. He knew he was already in a precarious position with you and one false step would land him out on his ass in the corridor. "I won't ask how you are," he had promised earlier. "I'll just assume things are shitty and we'll move on." You approved of this plan. You needed someone who didn't look at you like you were broken, a _victim_. Even more than that, you needed someone who could hold back from attacking an inanimate object until he was out of your sight. (He made it halfway down the hall on his way out before kicking the hell out of the metal door leading to the stairwell. It was impressive.)

You realized he had stopped talking and quickly said something about being happy that things seem to have settled down with his family. Your faraway tone probably made him think you were bullshitting him, but you genuinely meant it. "I'm sure Kathy's glad you guys could work things out."

He turned his head, staring at some invisible point on the wall. "Yeah, well, you do what you have to. At the end of the day, I made her a promise and now I've gotta keep it."

"Yeah." A promise, just like all the ones he never made to you. Maybe that was intentional. You heard what you wanted to in the silences, but maybe all all along it had just been his way of leaving himself an escape route. He would have kept any promise he made to you, you're certain of that, but he had made sure there were none to keep. You exhaled slowly, lips pressed together. "Maybe it's time for you to go now."

He made no move to get up from where he was sitting. "Can I just say one thing?" When you didn't reply, he continued. "I never forgot you. I know what you must think, but I didn't."

There is a difference between not forgetting someone and truly remembering them. Not forgetting takes work, a constant effort to keep holding on. Remembering is effortless, something that takes no holding on at all because it might as well be encoded in your DNA. Trying to explain that to him, however, would do nothing but keep him in the apartment that much longer and you were definitely ready to end this visit. "That's nice."

"You don't believe me, fine. I guess I can't blame you. But...fuck. I just needed to see you, needed to. To tell you I'm so fucking glad you lived."

His expression was perfectly transparent, and you might have doubted him before, but there was no way to fake the way he was looking at you now and the intensity was a bit uncomfortable. You took another deep breath. "Okay. I...thank you for coming. Honestly. I guess I needed this."

"I want to see you again."

"I don't know if that's a good idea. Actually, I think we probably shouldn't even mention that you were here today."

"Ah, loverboy's the jealous type."

"No, but I want to be completely above suspicion here."

"What's he gonna think we're doing?" he asked, amused.

"I just think it's better if we're not alone together." The last thing you needed right now was another reason for Brian to think you were hiding something from him, for Christ's sake.

"So we won't be. We'll sit at opposite ends of a park bench and look away from each other."

You decided to call his bluff. "Tuesday at three. I'll text you to tell you where to meet me," you said, nudging him out the door. "But don't start thinking...this isn't forgiveness. Don't read too much into it."

"I know." He looked at you like he thought he might not get the chance again for another two years before turning and walking down the hall. You closed the door and leaned your head against it, counting to ten in your mind before you heard the sound of his shoe against metal.

_I wanna know if it's you I don't trust_

_cause I damn sure don't trust myself_

When you heard the knock signalling that Brian was at the door, your spine stiffened as you sat up to await whatever was about to come. You held your breath as he walked in and regarded you cautiously. He looked so exhausted, maybe almost as much as you did, and you could feel your resistance crumbling fast. You nodded toward the spot next to you on the couch, stubborn to the very last drop and unable to actually say the words.

He barely had time to sit down before you collapsed against him, hands clutching the back of his shirt as giant sobs shook your whole body. "I hate this, I fucking hate this," you mumbled over and over between shuddering little gasps for air. It really was the only way to sum up everything going on in your head right then. You hated what that sick son of a bitch had done to you and kept right on doing to you even as he sat behind bars. You hated that you would never truly be able to rid yourself of him, whether it be from the ugly red scars or the even uglier memories lurking in even the most benign of places. You hated how it was wreaking havoc in every part of your life and in everyone around you, and most of all you hated yourself. You couldn't stop him then and you couldn't stop yourself now from becoming someone you hardly recognized, someone who would fall apart at the slightest provocation and call up the person who had crushed you in the worst of ways just to try and revive the past for a few precious minutes.

"It's gonna get better," he murmured soothingly, and your head jerked upward.

"Is it really? I've been telling people that for years, that they can get beyond all these incredibly tragic situations, and now I'm thinking- am I just full of shit?"

He looked momentarily panicked, mouth opening and closing. You assured him that it's okay, it was more of a rhetorical question, and he looked relieved. Wiping your blurry eyes for the millionth, but probably not last, time of the day, you clasped one of his hands in between yours. "I am...not very good at this. As you can tell." It was the closest thing to an apology you were offering for now. "And I know this is so hard on you. But I'm never going to be that person who can sit down and pour their heart out to you, or anyone. It's just not who I am. All I can give you for now is...you can ask me anything, and I promise you that I will give you an honest answer. It might not even be right away, but you have my word that it_ will_ happen."

"Wow. I...that's a pretty big leap of faith there."

"Yeah. But I wouldn't promise you something like that if I didn't trust you absolutely."

Both of you were silent for a moment, mulling over this new development. "Did...did you think you were going to die?"

You nodded without hesitation. "I knew it was a matter of time. I could tell he had this mental list of. Things he wanted to do to me. Once he was finished with that, I wouldn't be of any use to him anymore. So I decided I had to fight him as much as I was able, even if it might be worse for me in the short run, because it would buy more time. The longer it took him to get tired of me, the more chances I would have to escape or be found."

It was the most you had shared with anyone other than the doctors or the officer who had taken your original statement at the hospital, and he seemed to recognize the amount of strength it had taken to even say that much. He kissed the top of your head reverently as you leaned back in to let him put his arms around you once again- but this time you didn't let go.

_God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of_

Elliot was there at three o'clock just as planned, sitting on your prearranged bench and holding a coffee cup in each hand. "Please tell me that's actually alcoholic."

"No day drinking in the park for you, Benson," he chided, and you pretended to be upset but took the cup gratefully.

"Caffeine is almost as good. I think Brian's hiding his stash from me." When you had questioned him about it, he said he had switched to decaf, and when you called bullshit on that, he asked if you really needed it when you already weren't sleeping at night. He did things like that every day. It was enough to make you think seriously about using your connections to see if you could get him some mandatory overtime.

"So how did this whole Brian thing start? And when? And _why_?"

You wondered if this was the same tone he used to grill his daughters about their dates. Probably. In your mind he was the stereotypical sitcom dad, the kind who flashed his badge at every poor boy that set foot in the house and made sure the kid knew he would be up all night cleaning his Glock. "A year or so ago, I guess. To make an incredibly long story that is none of your business short, we ran into each other again, he got hurt, and so I helped him out for a bit while he was recovering. From there we kept seeing each other, and then we went on vacation together over Christmas, and then one day we just looked at each other and thought hmm, this must be serious. So go ahead, mock away."

He frowned in confusion. "I'm still stuck on the part where you voluntarily took time off work. You're actually capable of doing that? Doesn't count if you checked your phone every five minutes."

"Twice in ten days," you said smugly. "It was amazing, actually. We slept in every morning, spent all afternoon at the beach, and had sex about four times a day. Life was good." You threw in the last unnecessary detail simply because you knew the mental image would irritate him to no end.

It seemed to work, if his scowl was any indication. "Beautiful. And now that the honeymoon's over?"

"I don't know, El, but I'll be sure and call you when we figure it out. You'll be the first one to know."

"I just don't trust anyone who doesn't remember the seventies."

Your patience with the overprotective shtick was rapidly coming to a halt. "He's good to me, okay? For once I have somebody who adores me and who's not running away when shit gets intense so let's. Let's please just not do this."

He instantly picked up on the personal jab, turning his head toward you abruptly and starting to speak before thinking better of it and turning away from you again. Staring out across the green expanse in front of you, he scratched his chin and you could tell he was choosing his next words carefully. "How is it that it takes me all of thirty seconds to download an app that will let me trace my phone to the ends of the earth, and yet they still somehow manage to lose a five hundred thousand ton jumbo jet?"

"Thank you! That's what I keep saying. There's no logic to it at all."

_Now look at me, baby, struggling to do everything right_

_but then it all falls apart and out go the lights_

You are still waiting for the part where things get better.

A month had passed since you left the hospital, and you had finally reached the point where you could get out of bed on some mornings without having to wait a half hour for the painkillers to kick in first. The burns were beginning the lengthy process of healing, and your bad wrist became a little more useful every day, but those ailments had already found replacements. You have random stabbing chest pains, stomach cramps that leave you breathless and doubled over in agony, and a near constant headache. They're psychosomatic, the doctor says, as if knowing it's all in your head will make it any better, and he scribbles off a prescription for sleeping pills that you promptly crumple into a ball and stash at the bottom of your purse.

Sleep is not going to help. Sleep has become the enemy. You might be able to try and talk yourself out of the panic attacks that follow you throughout the day, but then the sun sets and any capacity for rational thought you may have had is gone. The night before, you had woken up to find your period had arrived unexpectedly early. Rather than recognize it for what it was, however, your sleep deprived and constantly hyper-alert brain immediately went into crisis mode. Blood. You were dying. He had come back to kill you, just like you knew he would. You had succumbed to sleep, giving him the chance to strike, and now you were going to bleed out right here on the cold bathroom floor. There was no use calling out for help, not when there obviously hadn't been anyone who was able to defend you. He had won. You hugged your knees to your chest and buried your head against them, tears running down your face in silent acceptance of your fate. After having been through the whole PTSD song and dance before, you swore to yourself you would never be a victim again, but a few years pass and here you are. You failed yourself again.

Some time later (Minutes? Weeks? Years? They all felt the same), there was a hand touching yours and a soft voice saying something you couldn't understand. You suddenly noticed the absence of any sort of excruciating pain and realized that this must be it, that you had died. "I'm dead," you told the voice. "He killed me, I'm dead." The voice kept talking, and you couldn't make out the words but it seemed to be arguing with you. "I'm dead," you insisted again, and you never really had a theory on what an afterlife might be like, but you didn't think you would have to argue your case to the gatekeeper.

Now he was calling you by name, softly pleading with you to open your eyes, just look at me, Liv, please. You raised your head a fraction of an inch, peeking up through your lashes and then shutting your eyes again to block out the sudden brightness of the light bulbs above the mirror. But now you recognized the feel of the fingertips brushing your wrist and the voice promising that you hadn't died and you looked up again to see Brian crouched down in front of you. It was all coming into focus at once, that you were very much alive, slumped down against a wall while half-asleep and covered in a cold sweat. "Fuck," you mumbled, refusing any help even as you struggled to get to your feet.

"Where did you go there? Another dream?" he asked cautiously, and you certainly weren't going to explain the whole ridiculous story of your death and subsequent resurrection, so you kept reassuring him that you were fine as you urged him out of the room with a bullshit request for a glass of water. He looked over at the sink you were leaning against pointedly, but then just gave you a tight smile and retreated.

You groaned to yourself, wanting nothing else other than to go back to bed and never speak of this again, but the evening's second act was just getting started. Brian made the grave tactical error of coming back into the room while you were still getting changed, and there was no polite way to put it- you snapped. Panicked by the thought that he might have caught a glimpse of the scars across your torso that you kept so carefully hidden, you let go with an angry outburst that you had been saving up for quite some time. Having been raised by the queen of nonsensical tirades, you came about the talent honestly, and it took hardly any effort at all to call him every name you had ever heard and a few that you were pretty sure you had made up just for the occasion.

He stood still and silent as you pushed at his shoulders ineffectually, both of you knowing you were wanting to emphasise a point more than you were actually attempting to hurt him. You paused in your ranting long enough to come up for air, and that's when you saw it. The genuine look of fear in his eyes. Not _of_ you, but _for_ you, as if he was afraid you might have crossed over into a place that there was no returning from. You could see your eyes reflected in his as well, and if you looked even closer you could see a little girl, no more than seven or eight, backed into a corner and unable to keep from flinching as an older woman grabbed her upper arm roughly. "Don't _look_ at me like I'm _crazy_!" the woman shrieked, but the little girl is watching you instead, well and truly betrayed.

You pushed past him, unable to stand the expression on his face anymore, and he let you go without protest. Your fury only grew as you threw open the kitchen cabinets one by one, unable to find what you were looking for, and you got the distinct impression that he was hiding your stash to keep you away from it when you were in precisely the mood you were in right then. Fuck that. No caffeine, no alcohol- what the hell was this place turning into?

The refrigerator was your last resort, and it's there that you found an assortment of whatever cheap beers he was always drinking. He probably didn't think to hide them because he was sure you wouldn't touch that shit. He was wrong.

You grabbed a few bottles and collapsed on the couch, trying to ignore the disgusting taste in your mouth because you knew it was all for a greater good and you would thank yourself once you were nicely buzzed. The vision of your younger self still haunted you. How could you even explain it to her? It would be no comfort for her to know that she might never be able to forgive, but someday she would understand. Someday she would know for herself how easy it is to give into the rage when there's nothing else left inside you.

When you finished off bottle number four and decided to call it a night, you shuffled back into the dark bedroom where he was lying on his side of the bed and watching you with glazed-over eyes. "I am so fucking embarrassed," you slurred, the latest in your string of non-apologies. "Damn it."

"We don't need to talk about it now, just come back to bed," he said in a voice that indicated he wasn't going to want to talk about it in the morning, or ever. You did as told, climbing under the covers and shifting until your head was resting in the crook of his arm. "Whatever you think I saw, I didn't. So...there's that."

You know he was telling the truth, because otherwise he would be going on about how he didn't care and you were still beautiful to him or some tired shit like that. His palm slid upward over your back and you shook your head in warning. "Not the hair," you reminded him, and it was the last thing you would say until dawn.

Neither of you would fall asleep that night.

_I wanna read your mind and know just what I've got in this new thing I've found_

The phone chimed, and you jumped to your feet with a stifled cry. That wasn't Brian's assigned ringtone, but you couldn't think of who else would be calling at...1:47 AM, the green light above the microwave helpfully informed you.

"What are we watching?" the voice on the other end asked casually, unaware of the momentary terror his call had caused.

"Why are you calling? I could've been asleep, you know. We both could have been, and how would explain to him why my ex-partner is bothering me in the middle of the night? That seems a little suspicious."

"You weren't asleep and he's not there."

"And how do you know that?"

"Retirement was boring me so I took a job with the Psychic Friends hotline," Elliot retorted. "Now what are we watching?"

You didn't remember how it started so many years ago, the late night ritual of picking up the phone when you had a hunch that the other wasn't sleeping. He had a nearly perfect record of predicting when you were awake- and if you had ever woken him up, he had never let on. But that was the better part of a decade ago, and just because you may have been sitting alone in the apartment with every light on and one hand on your gun, it didn't mean you were going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right.

"Channel 34 has an infomercial about aerobics for seniors. Relevant to your interests?" you teased. The unspoken rules of these phone calls were clear- no shop talk and no conversations that might bring up strong feelings of any kind, because experience had shown that they could be dangerous for two overtired minds lulled into the false safety of darkness. This basically left nothing but late night TV, and the two of you had sampled all its delights over the years, from infomercials to music videos and outdated movies that had no business being made in the first place.

"Seventeen. A vitamin to postpone menopause. Relevant to yours?"

"I'm wounded," you said dryly, flipping to the right channel. The commercial is over, and now a Spanish-speaking couple on screen was bickering back and forth, something about where to hide the money. Now they were falling backwards together onto a hotel bed, and you cringed for a few seconds before punching a button on the remote. You always had to change the channel when a sex scene went on too long (as though that would be the most graphic thing you had ever witnessed together and somebody's virtue would be irreversibly compromised). Next channel- sitcom where some overly emotional woman was confessing her love for her best friend. Christ, no.

You perked back up when you found an old favorite, an ad for one of those Time Life CD collections. "Oh God, El, they're still selling that one."

"Power ballads of the 80's?" he guessed correctly. Upon seeing a clip of a woman in a very dated wedding dress walking down the aisle, he chuckled.

"Don't even start, I know what you're going to say."

"But it's Guns 'n Roses, Liv, and you are the last one-"

"Axl Rose is a deplorable human being, no one's arguing with that, but there wasn't a college girl on earth who didn't get a little emotional when November Rain was playing."

"Including you?"

"I guess you'll never know." You stood up and made your way around the apartment, switching the lights off as you went while the two of you moved on to debating which Springsteen song was the all time greatest. By the time you had laid out a convincing case as to why nothing would ever top Rosalita, the flickering of the TV and the moonlight streaming through the blinds were the only things left lighting up the room. Curled up on the couch with Bon Jovi playing in the background and Elliot's voice in your ear, you closed your eyes for the first time in days.

_So when you look at me, you'd better look hard and look twice_

_is that me, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?_


	3. Films About Ghosts

Still more vignettes of Olivia's life post-Surrender Benson. On the things that make up a life: sex, memories, and proper phone manners.

A/N: the references to violence and (consensual) sex get a bit more graphic in this bit, but still nothing terribly explicit. Title and quotes from Mrs. Potter's Lullaby by Counting Crows. Elliot's text is a reference to Rosalita by Bruce Springsteen, which was mentioned before in part two. The bits from the form Olivia fills out are taken from a sexual assault response training at my previous job. The actual form that's given to new clients goes on like that for six pages(!). Yeah, I wouldn't finish it either.

I am so grateful for everyone who has read and commented thus far. I can't honestly say I know when this is coming to an end, but I already have a part four half-completed and I know for sure that is not the end, so there you go!

* * *

_{Memories are films about ghosts you can never escape}_

You knew this whole therapy thing would be difficult.

You did not, however, anticipate that you would think seriously about running out of the office before you even got started. A multi-page form stared up at you, standing in between you and...what? At the heart of it, you were there because you needed a psychological clearance before you could go back to work, and that was the main reason why you weren't downstairs jumping in the first cab, bus, or horse-drawn carriage you came across. You wouldn't be picky as long as it returned you to the safety of home and away from this stack of paper that didn't seem to know when to back the fuck off.

_-What sexual or nonsexual acts did the assailant perform?_

_-In considering the sexual acts performed, is this the first experience you ever had with any of the above?_

_-Do you feel guilty or ashamed about the assault or about the way you behaved during it?_

_-Please describe any previous traumatic or extremely stressful events you may have experienced in the past._

You wondered if it would be too flippant to put down 'life, 1968-present' for the latter. God knows there wasn't enough room on the page to list them all individually. Positive attitude, you reminded yourself. Your previous attempt at therapy a few years prior had been hindered by your own cynicism, like a magician at a magic show- what was the point when you already knew all the tricks going on behind the curtain? What could anyone tell you that you couldn't already tell yourself?

That had been a very different time, however. As genuinely traumatic as your 'near miss' at the prison had been, you had never reached the point you were at now, where you were ready to suspend your disbelief and watch as many rabbits being pulled out of hats as it took for you to get some semblance of your old life back.

You are glad that you are already acquainted with your therapist, at least on a professional level. As mortifying as your old home week at the emergency room had been, you needed the reassurance of someone familiar if you were going to voluntarily pour out whatever inside of you passed for a soul these days. What's more, you needed someone who would recognize that you weren't deliberately trying to be difficult, that this was just your sparkling personality (and positive attitude).

An attitude which was being put to the test before the hour had barely even begun. You were focused on your hands in your lap, head down when you heard a phrase that almost made you jump to your feet. "Rape victims-"

"No, nope," you said in the firm voice you typically brought out for defense attorneys trying to put words in your mouth on the stand. "I wasn't raped."

He frowned. "The legal definition of the word covers more than-"

"I'm aware of the definition."

He glanced at the folder in his hand, the one you knew contained a copy of your statement from the hospital. "But in this, you said-"

"I know what I said. I'm telling you that wasn't rape."

Realizing that he was not going to win this one, he stopped arguing semantics and tried a different tactic. "Making that distinction is important to you."

"Yes." This was exactly the kind of shit a stranger wouldn't have gotten away with.

"And why is that?"

"My mother was raped before I was born." Hey, it was the truth, and it was enough for now. "I saw how...she never really recovered, never felt like she could start to heal from it. It haunted her until the day she died."

"You don't want to repeat that in your own life."

Your fingernails dug into the skin of your palm. "You're right. I really don't," you snapped. You hadn't gotten to where you were now just to end up in the same position, like your entire existence had been one big fucked up cycle where nothing you had done had made a goddamn bit of difference. There needed to be some hard line of separation, and you were going to make sure it wasn't crossed no matter what happened,_ now we're gonna play a game, baby, you've got two choices _and it was obvious what you were desperate to prevent, what your choice was going to be, _you just keep making this harder for yourself, how fucked up is that, I wonder how far you'd go_, and maybe it was fucked up but you weren't going to become her, _shut up bitch this is what you wanted, right, you were fucking begging for it_ but there was never a good choice and he was always going to win but goddamn you weren't giving in now...

And suddenly you were back to reality, head buried in your shaking hands. You looked up hesitantly and there was no doubt that you had been talking aloud. "Fuck, I didn't...shit, I'm sorry, I don't know what to say. I'm sorry."

He tells you that you have to let yourself feel it, that it's the only way to heal.

Feel it. Right. Yeah.

_{I woke up in mid-afternoon because that's when it all hurts the most}_

Now that Brian was back to working most nights, your life was starting to settle into a nice little dysfunctional pattern.

He always left well before the summer sun had gone down, but still your first order of business was turning all the lamps on in preparation for the darkness. If you had been out while he left, you would make the rounds with your gun cocked at the ready until you were convinced you were alone.

All that only took twenty minutes or so at your most paranoid, meaning you had a lot of remaining hours to fill up, and sleep was not a viable option. For the first time in possibly ever, you wondered why you didn't have more hobbies. Cooking was a non-starter unless you found a book of odorless recipes. Anything creative was out due to your complete lack of talent and your apathy toward crafts. They reminded you too much of your mother, how she fancied herself as some sort of artist but never actually completed anything once she remembered that drinking took a lot less effort.

Unfortunately for you, drinking wasn't an option because of practical considerations. As soon as you had finished your nightly sweep of the apartment, the bathroom door was closed, not to be opened again until you were no longer alone. This obviously presented some challenges. You had plenty of previous experience from being trapped in a car for hours on stakeouts, but this was getting a little ridiculous. You were a grown woman (middle aged, you could hear Elliot's voice reminding you), and you shouldn't be terrified by so much as taking a single step past a doorway. And yet here you were.

Remembering something isn't going to cause it to happen again, your therapist had said. Memories themselves aren't dangerous. You felt like this must be very easy to say for someone who hadn't spent any time in your head, who didn't remember feeling the porcelain of the sink digging into your back and the coldness of a gun against skin damp with sweat and blood and who knows what the hell else and _you're so fucking *easy*, fuck, I wasn't even fucking trying there _and you're shaking and god no it won't stop...

The door would stay closed.

_{I know that I have to get out because I have been there before}_

Another item on your nightly schedule was meltdown time which, amazingly, was just what the name implied. You had made a deal with yourself, that in exchange for holding your shit together all day you would have an appointed hour to let yourself break apart. When that time came, you would curl up on the couch or collapse on the bed and just sob, pulling your knees toward your chest in a fetal position and rocking back and forth slightly in an instinctive attempt to comfort yourself. Sometimes you screamed, voice drowned out by loud music and a pillow pressed to your face to keep the neighbors from complaining. Sometimes you channeled your inner Elliot and found things to smash.

It was what had always gotten you through before. You cried and you raged and then the mask went back on and life moved forward. There was no other way you would have survived that whole page of 'traumatic or extremely stressful events' that made up your life. You would say you were a shark, forced to keep moving or die, but you were pretty sure that even sharks slept regularly.

Even without sleep, you might as well have been swimming circles in a goldfish bowl for all the progress you were making. Sharks weren't meant to be in bowls. It had been five weeks and six days since you came home from the hospital and you were going to suffocate and drown if you couldn't break free of this thing you were trapped in. Six fucking weeks! It was time. You can't put recovery on a timeline, Dr. Lindstrom had said. It's not a linear process and it doesn't follow a schedule. And that was great- for normal people. Not you. You didn't have the luxury of time to go back and forth through thirty stages of grief and self pity and complete fucking helplessness. You were a shark, and sharks didn't stay in one place long enough to get hurt. They attacked and then disappeared back into the depths before anyone had time to discover their weaknesses.

The top story on the eleven o'clock news was a huge kiddie porn bust. You could see Nick and Amanda rushing around behind the reporter, all their obnoxious sexual tension temporarily forgotten, lives racing forward as yours inched along. The urge to be out there with them, _where you belonged_, was so strong that you almost reached toward the screen as if you could just step through it and take up your place.

Soon.

_{The lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep}_

Elliot usually called sometime after midnight. You had offhandedly mentioned what nights Brian was working, and he had apparently taken notice. When he had called two nights in a row, it was obvious he was trying to check up on you, no matter what he said about retirement having done nothing to curb his insomniac tendencies. You assured him that you were completely fine, honestly, but you never specifically told him not to call and he knew this was Liv-speak for _you are what gets me through the night but I will die before I say that aloud, please don't make me say it._

Besides, you're pretty sure the timing of these calls had less to do with when he happened to be awake and everything to do with when the wife happened to be asleep. Your late night socializing had been one of the first casualties of his move back home. Now, you always thought Kathy was quite a tolerant person, all things considered, but her husband being on the phone with someone else at 3 AM evidently surpassed the limits of said tolerance.

"It's not enough that you're with her 16 hours a day? What can you possibly have left to talk about?" you had heard her shouting on the other end of the line before you hung up, deciding that this was probably not a conversation you wanted to be a party to. This was definitely why polygamy died out, you were sure of it. Much too difficult. You had no ill will toward Kathy- quite the opposite. She was clearly a better woman than you, because you were pretty sure you would only last a week or so before kicking his ass to the curb if you had to live with the guy. Ten days, tops. But even with you having zero desire to usurp her place in his life, there was no escaping the unspoken negotiations that had gone on between you and her with every move he made. It was a delicate dance, handing him over to another woman and a world you would never be a part of, having to rely on blind faith that he would eventually return. You didn't even want to imagine how complicated it would get if you threw sex (or prairie dresses) into the mix.

After that you stopped calling, out of respect for Kathy and the recognition that you were sharing once again, that he was no longer yours at all hours of the day and night. You waited for him to be the one to seek you out, and he kept the TV off so it would be more believable as a work-related discussion if the lady of the house happened to walk in on him again.

There was no using that as an excuse now, of course, and your attitude toward the whole situation had shifted in Elliot's absence. You didn't think she knew you were in contact with him again and you really didn't care if or how he explained it to her. That was his problem. You always had a sense that they fought about you much more than he would ever let on, and you had spent far too long already feeling guilty about interfering in the marriage of a guy you had never even kissed. You were done spending time dealing with the emotional fallout of this 'affair' when you hadn't even gotten a few decent fucks out of it.

That didn't mean that you didn't get a tiny thrill every night when the phone rang, knowing that he was putting his ass on the line and he had decided you were worth the risk anyway. Even now, when all you were doing was mumbling sleepily to each other over the sound of an old Seinfeld episode- it meant something to him. What exactly, you couldn't begin to guess, but _something_.

You were gazing through the window at a sky that would be light in a few short hours, listening to him breathe on the other end of the line, and you heard the sniffing sound that meant he was about to doze off on you. "Go to sleep."

He insisted he was awake, but you knew it was all for your benefit. "I'm falling asleep too," you lied.

"Nahyourenot," he murmured, because he would argue with you whether he was asleep, comatose, or dead and buried.

"I am and I'm hanging up."

"Nope."

"Goodnight, El."

Click.

_Thank you_, you mouthed to the glowing screen.

_{I can bleed as well as anyone but I need someone to help me sleep}_

When Brian finally walked through the door in the morning, you kissed him hello and then sprinted down the hall to end your self-inflicted bathroom exile. You deliberately took your time in the bathtub, both because you really fucking needed a way to decompress after enduring another night and because the longer you waited, the more likely it was that he would decide to go to bed by the time you emerged. It was much easier to play it that way than to sit around willing your eyes to stay open and making not so subtle hints about how he should get some sleep. Your ultimate goal, of course, was to get him to go to bed so you could do the same thing. When he asked, you would assure him that you were sleeping at nights, absolutely. If he pressed you on the subject, you would point out that according to your doctor, you were supposed to be getting plenty of rest and he was the one who wanted you to take it easy in the first place, no? (He had no good response for that one).

Despite the elaborate maneuvers it took to get to this point, you slept much better on these days than you did when he was home at night. The dreams didn't go away, but opening your eyes to see the July afternoon sun beaming down on you through the blinds was comforting in a way that darkness just couldn't be. It also made it much easier to identify who was next to you. This was the longest you had ever gone sharing a bed with someone on a daily basis, so waking up next to somebody only inches away from you was startling even under the best of circumstances. You had also never really been a snuggler, far too used to taking up as much space as you wanted, and lately anything that made you feel pinned down or restrained scared the hell out of you for obvious reasons.

Your solution to this, developed after a few sleepless nights of trial and error for both of you, was to sleep clutching one of those big body pillows in front of you like a shield. Problem solved and everyone slept happily ever after- or not. As much as you were skittish about being too close to someone when you woke up, you also found yourself inevitably trying to move closer to him while you were asleep, giant pillow and all. In the interest of not smothering the poor guy when you ended up sprawled out halfway on top of him, you started curling up on the bed almost horizontally with your head resting on his thigh. "You're going to fuck up your back that way," he predicted, but it was actually strangely comfortable, close but not unbearably so. For you, at least. You know you are taking over his bed and his apartment and his life and you wonder if it's possible that he resents you for it even more than you yourself already do.

As you fall asleep, you think about how you have a good thing here, and maybe he loves you, and good things don't last.

_{The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings}_

And then one day, you were sick.

It started with a dizzy, nauseous feeling. This was already a daily occurrence for you, but that day it moved from the usual anxiety-fueled dry heaving to the kind that forces you to clutch the toilet bowl like it's a dear old friend.

"How do you even have anything in your stomach? You don't eat," Brian pointed out, having called in to work in order to keep an eye on you (and point out the obvious).

"How the hell should I know?" You were grateful he was there to save you from puking in the kitchen sink due to the whole irrational bathroom phobia thing, but this wasn't the time to get into another fight about what you were or weren't eating, not when you'd already used up your one food-related argument for the day.

He refrained from making any more stupid observations and stayed up with you for the rest of the night, watching muted replays of baseball games on TV and rubbing your back when you complained that the lower third of it felt like it was on fire. It was enough to make you feel guilty for blowing up at him that morning when you smelled bread burning in the toaster because what, are you not capable of keeping an eye on something for thirty fucking seconds, is it really that hard for you, am I just supposed to sit here all day and try to ignore that it smells like you're fucking torching something in here? You had even stormed out just to prove how angry you were, hearing him shout that you could go to hell as you slammed the door, and you decided not to give him the satisfaction of knowing that it was a very tempting offer. Hell had to be better than sitting on concrete stairs for an hour and swearing to yourself until you decided to go back because you really fucking needed a drink to forget about this shit.

By the next morning you were actually feeling a bit better- probably because Brian had been right and there just wasn't anything left to throw up, as appealing as that thought was. You had made a big show out of eating (unburned) toast and were sipping Gatorade on the couch, intent on peeling the label off of the bottle in one piece, when the landline phone started ringing.

"Go," he said into the receiver, his standard way of answering that you tried to wean him off of before you started finding it strangely endearing. "Who? No shit? No. Really? Serious? Wow. Uh, yeah, I guess, I can ask her?" He set the phone down, looking like he had gotten a call from beyond the grave. "Elliot?"

"Is on the phone?" you finished for him, hoping you looked sufficiently shocked at this and not like someone who had seen your supposedly AWOL ex-partner just two days earlier. "Give me that."

You marched into the bedroom and shut the door behind you before you held the phone up to your ear. "What the hell are you doing calling me here?" you hissed.

"I kept trying your cell last night and you weren't answering."

You closed your eyes in frustration because yes, you had four missed calls, two voicemail messages, and a text- «_rosie come out tonight_»- all from the same number. "I just woke up. It was a long night, okay, so give me a break." In all honesty, you had considered texting back when you checked your phone first thing that morning, but you deliberately decided to make him wait because you suspected that the only reason he kept calling was that he thought you were getting laid. Along with knowing when you couldn't sleep, he also seemed to have an uncanny ability to choose the absolute worst moments to interrupt. And if you didn't pick up right away, he was all too happy to keep calling until the mood was officially killed and you gave in.

He always had known exactly what you had been doing before you answered, you were certain of it, but he would pretend to be completely unaware as he launched into whatever he was using as an excuse to call. Once it was to ask if you thought he should color-code the tabs on old files.

"Why are you calling to ask me this? Could it not wait until morning?" you had snapped.

"Hey, you're the one who answered. If you didn't want to be bothered, you should've turned your phone off."

"You know I can't do that. What if it was an emergency?"

"If it was that urgent, don't you think I'd try your home phone when you didn't pick up your cell?"

You had groaned in exasperation at that. "You know, I would never call you just because I thought you were-"

"You don't need to."

"And why is that?"

"Because you already know I'd always pick up."

So that is what you were up against here. "I hate to disappoint you, El, but you didn't interrupt me having sex last night."

"I know that. Why do you think I'm calling his phone now?"

"I have no idea, but I'm sure you'll tell me," you said with a weary sigh, waiting to be enlightened.

He acted like the answer should have been obvious. "Because after the third try, I knew something had to be wrong. You would've picked up and told me off by then if you were just screwing the idiot."

"The key there is the third try, El, normal people would leave a message and give it a rest," you said, avoiding the implied question of what you were actually doing last night. "Listen, I can't get into this now. He's leaving for work in a few hours and I'll call you then."

"No, I'll come out there," he insisted, clearly still convinced there was something afoot that he needed to see for himself. "Seven?"

"Fine. Now stop calling. I already don't know how I'm going to explain this one."

"Hey, that's not my problem. You're the one who wants me to be your dirty little secret," he said.

"Mmhmm. And I bet you'll tell your wife exactly where you're going."

Pause. "I'll see you later."

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

_{you can see a million miles tonight but you can't get very far}_

When you weren't being sick and miserable or answering harassing calls from a certain ex-partner, you were thinking about sex. Or something resembling it, at least. You were pretty sure this, whatever this was, didn't fall under the traditional definition of the word.

It wasn't one of your absolute top priorities, not like being able to sleep soundly through the night or eat full meals on a regular basis, but goddamn how you missed it. You had already had far less sex in your life than you might have preferred (and not just because of ill-timed phone calls, although those didn't help). Then you finally had an actual relationship, where you actually had the opportunity on a regular basis- and now that was all shot to hell.

Six weeks had elapsed before the idea didn't sound completely revolting. You had done some, well...self-experimentation, curious about whether it was of those things that seemed great in your head but not so much in practice. The first time there was nothing. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it was literally just nothing. Even that familiar cold sensation of numbness would've been better than feeling like you weren't even present in your own body, like you were nothing but an outer shell disconnected from anything inside. You ended that first attempt by polishing off an entire bottle of wine, but it still wasn't enough to keep you from smashing it against the kitchen floor once you were finished. At least you sure as hell felt something when you accidentally cut your finger cleaning up the glass.

Amazingly, the second try was worse. Your brain had somehow missed the memo that said you were in total control of the situation and switched into full on panic mode. You tried to talk yourself out of it and keep going but it hurt, oh God it hurt, it shouldn't be like this what the hell am I doing here I can't do this I can't breathe oh shitshitshit. Needless to say, meltdown time came early and another defenseless bottle was sacrificed that afternoon.

The third time you were prepared. You popped a couple of your leftover painkillers beforehand, waiting until you felt your muscles start to loosen up and and your brain went slightly fuzzy. Now you were all warm and relaxed and- fuck, okay, this time you were finally getting somewhere. Better living through chemistry indeed.

Of course, you had a willing live victim to experiment on as well. You had become fascinated by this new and foreign concept, the idea that someone coming that close to you didn't automatically equal pain, and you needed to reassure yourself of this by testing your theory over and over. Where for weeks you had drawn the line at kissing, your boundaries had suddenly expanded to include anything that could be done while you were still completely dressed. As long as you had your protective armor, even if it was nothing more than the tank top and yoga pants that doubled as your come hither signal, you were borderline insatiable.

Luckily for you, your boyfriend was a very, very patient guy. For whatever else he might have done that served to piss you off on a daily basis, he never once tried to push you past your self-imposed limits, even though you knew that your imitation of a 16 year old trying to save her virginity for prom night was probably getting irritating (at the very least).

It was also fortunate that you both had a sense of humor about the whole thing. Yesterday you had been texting back and forth throughout the day, the messages getting progressively more suggestive until you pretty much jumped him when he walked through the door, determined not to let go until you were a completely satisfied customer.

"Liv. Shit. Help me out here?" he asked after quite some time had elapsed, shifting underneath you to emphasize his point.

"Nuh-uh," you mumbled, nosing at a spot behind his ear. "My turn. You wait."

He was starting to get whiny, and you were having more and more trouble keeping a straight face. "It's...fuck, it's been your turn. Twice. C'mon."

"You promised me," you insisted, kissing him to end the discussion and rocking your hips into his once, twice, doing your best to ignore whatever the hell was going on with him. "Goddamnit, did...what...did you...?"

"Hey, I warned you! You left me no choice. What was I supposed to do?" He at least had the good sense to sound apologetic, you gave him that much.

You let your forehead rest against the pillow. "'s cheating," you said before glancing over at him and realizing you weren't the only one struggling not to crack up. It was a battle neither of you were going to win, so you gave in and let it overtake you both. You held on to each other and laughed, the kind of laughter where eventually you're just laughing for the hell of it because you can't remember what exactly was so funny in the first place. The two of you used to do that from time to time, laugh hysterically at things that weren't even that amusing just to escape all the shit in your daily lives, but that was before and you had started to wonder when (or if) anything would feel that completely hilarious again.

By the time he had gotten up and came back, you had finally managed to settle down and were sitting perched on the foot of the bed, pulling your hair up in a messy ponytail. He sat down next to you and you nudged his knees apart, shifting over until you were sitting in between them to try and make your intentions obvious. "You don't have to, you know."

"Oh, I know I don't," you scoffed, the tone of your voice light to try and reassure him that seriously, you were okay. No way in hell were you going to risk fucking up all the progress the two of you had made so far with anything you weren't absolutely sure about.

He smirked. "You get what I'm saying. I don't want you to feel obligated."

You laughed sharply, the corners of your mouth twisting upward. "When have I ever felt obligated?" He didn't get a chance to respond before you continued, raising an eyebrow. "Was I supposed to? Have I been missing something all this time?"

"Man, you are so stubborn-" he said, but the way he looked at you made it clear that he wasn't going to complain.

"You should probably be very careful about what you say next," you warned. "Or better yet, just stop talking altogether."

"I can do that."

_{One last light to turn out and one last bell to ring}_

"Liv..."

"Mmm?"

"Don't think I don't notice what you're doing."

"What am I doing?"

He swatted at your hand, turning away from you to sit at the edge of the bed. "Down, woman, down! I've only got a few hours to sleep before I have to haul my ass back out there. You're done."

"Ohhh, so I'm obligated, but you're free to go when you please? I see how this double standard works here." You pushed yourself up into a sitting position, laughing softly. "Get me a drink while you're up?"

"Only because I'm hoping you'll drink yourself to sleep and get off me."

"You're ridiculous." You shook your head as he walked out of the room, reaching over for your phone when you saw the blinking light.

_«I could have called you but I didn't»_

_«that was big of you. Truly.»_

_«you're welcome»_

_«go to sleep, el»_


	4. Optimist

Oh my. So here's the deal...this whole thing was originally meant to be a one-shot. Then I decided to take it through to the end of the time gap in Surrender Benson. This part was supposed to accomplish that, but it was getting out of hand, so there will be another short one or two scene part to wrap that up. After that, I'll likely skip ahead to some point later in the season.

As always, I'm so thankful to all the lovely people who take the time to comment. I've been in fic 'retirement' for almost five years, so this is a wonderful welcome back.

Same warnings in place as always. Title and quotes from Pompeii by Bastille.

* * *

_{if you close your eyes_

_does it almost feel like you've been here before?}_

July is familiar.

Too familiar, to be exact. Seven weeks was all it took before you were back in the ER, reuniting with your old buddies and thanking all the deities out there that compared to your last visit, you were doing pretty goddamn well- not like that was saying much.

This time you had been lying listlessly on the couch, clutching a fleece blanket that covered you all the way up to your chin. It may have been July, and the air conditioner in the apartment was pathetic on its best days, but you were shivering nonetheless. The night before you had kept getting up to add layers of clothing until you had so much on that you felt like a penguin, waddling more than you were walking.

And yet when Brian came home, you refused to entertain his suggestion that you were sick (still sick, or sick again? You had so many things going on that it was hard to tell if you ever actually recovered from any of them). You were fine, you said with a dismissive shake of your head. All you really wanted was to sleep now that he was finally home. Of course, in what was probably his passive aggressive revenge for your obvious dishonesty, he decided to put off going to bed and sat down with a horrid smelling sandwich to watch The View. Having developed a fascination with daytime tv after working nights for so long, he would laugh and shake his head and agree or disagree with the ladies out loud as if they were his lifelong friends.

To you personally, it reminded you of everything you had always hated about groups of women, everyone talking over one another in higher and higher pitched voices until someone finally wore the rest of the group down with their shrill buzzing. You were feeling nauseous again, and the TV wasn't helping. You moved to get up off of the couch and, in one oddly fluid motion, fell flat on your ass. "Shit."

He stopped mid-laugh and rushed over to you as you flailed around in an unsuccessful attempt to get to your feet. "'m okay, gimme a second. Just a little dizzy."

Long story short, he didn't believe you, especially not when he felt your forehead and said you were so warm that you might have been radiating heat waves. He was exaggerating, really, but you were in the ER waiting room before you knew it. (Literally, before you knew it. You were getting a little loopy and wouldn't remember how you got from the floor to the hospital).

The woman sitting across from you had a tattoo of a pot leaf covering one entire side of her neck. She was turned around, yelling to anyone who would listen that she didn't have time for this, okay, she had a husband at home and DOGS got treated better than this. You liked her. It was nice to feel like you_ weren't_ the most out of control person in the room for once.

You didn't know the nurse who finally called your name, and while that had its advantages, you almost would've preferred listening to another uncomfortable 'I'm so sorry' from an acquaintance who would never look at you the same way again. It's not like they were going to see or hear anything they didn't already know, and it would have saved you from trying to explain the whole story once more while your heart thumped erratically and your lungs couldn't seem to get enough oxygen in them. The poster on the wall in front of you looked harmless enough, a cartoon monster of some sort reminding you to get a flu shot, but it was that same poster that had stared you in the face for hours the last time you were here. You had forced yourself to focus on the little creature's beady purple eyes, shutting out the pain and fear and the pitying looks from the doctors and nurses as they catalogued your injuries. Every question received a monotone answer, as matter of fact as if you were reading excerpts from the phone book. You never once said his name and it took a conscious effort not to refer to yourself in the third person.

Now here you were once again, and the nurse was gaping at you like she wasn't even sure where the hell to start. You wanted to tell her to take it easy because the best was yet to come.

"I'm only doing this once," you said with a firm shake of your head, refusing to give her the whole magical mystery tour of your injuries until the doctor arrived. She gave you a look that said you wouldn't be receiving any patient of the year awards from her and asked if you wanted the guy you were with to come back while you were waiting. That earned another sharp no from you and her disapproving frown deepened, undoubtedly wondering how much of a bitch you must be to live with. More than you can imagine, lady.

The magazine on the table next to you had a cover story about a still-living Princess Diana going on an exotic vacation with a new love, but you picked it up anyway just to have something to focus on other than flu monsters and the way your stomach plunged every time your heart skipped a beat. According to your recent ECG, everything was physically fine ("if you were having a heart attack, you would be dead already," the receptionist had assured you). The PA who had done the test had clapped you on the shoulder- you had shuddered, he didn't notice- when he told you that you should relax and try to avoid becoming overly anxious. He wrote you a prescription for Xanax and sent you out with a warning not to drive after taking it.

As relieved as you were to know that you weren't on the verge of a massive coronary, you still weren't sure how exactly you were supposed to relax when every skipped beat seemed to leave your head that much lighter. You counted them as you laid awake at night, wondering which might be the lucky number that could cause you to black out altogether from lack of oxygen. In other words, it was not terribly conducive to avoiding anxiety.

Nor was having to show off all your scars to yet another pair of strangers. Trying to avoid looking at them as much as possible, you pointed each one out like a tour guide in some grotesque museum of human cruelty. Your memories of the 'incident' were starting to change. Some details were becoming fuzzy, and you were starting to doubt some of your other recollections, which you had been assured were normal reactions to traumatic events. Unfortunately, your injuries served as ugly mementos of the stories behind each of them- a cigarette burn, a cut from a kitchen knife, a bite mark. You remembered every one much too clearly.

When you had finished, the nurse pointed to the thin white line across your throat. "Oh, that's years old," you said with all the emotion of someone describing what they had for breakfast. Only in your life, you thought wryly, was a near-stabbing a relatively minor event. Civilians had no idea what they were missing out on.

After all the fun and games had ended, the official diagnosis was that you were a human train wreck (and yes, you were sure that was the proper scientific term for it). One of your wounds had gotten infected- naturally, the one that was already the worst in terms of the sheer fucking horrific way you had been gifted with it. "I'm no plastic surgeon, man oh man, but that shouldn't be healing like that," the doctor had announced, clearly pleased with the chance to put that med school dermatology rotation to good use. Not content to stay in one place, the infection had somehow teleported to your kidneys, which you never noticed because you were too busy being 'considerably' dehydrated. When the doctor asked you when you had last eaten and you said you couldn't remember, he didn't look especially surprised.

They gave you a stack of papers to sign that you didn't bother to read. You were probably consenting to a lobotomy, but you would have been fine with that if it could save you from having a conversation about how "it's okay to have trouble coping with these kinds of things"- because Dr. Whoever was speaking from experience, no doubt. And here you were thinking you were coping relatively well because you hadn't considered eating your gun yet. You resisted the urge to thank him for giving you permission to feel and assured him that you were already going to counseling, now if you would please just tell me what I have to do to get out of here.

Next they hooked you up to an IV so they could pump God only knows how many substances into your bloodstream. You suspected one of them was a sedative, but they tried to convince you that drowsiness was just a side effect of some anti-nausea drug and thrust a cup into your hand. The liquid in it tasted like tears that had fallen onto your bottom lip and slid into your mouth, a taste you were well acquainted with, but there was no emotion behind it this time and somehow it made you feel as empty as that little paper cup. You were promised some Gatorade if you could keep that down- now there's a reason to stay alive if you ever heard one- and Brian came back to see you with Us Weekly in hand because he knew mindless celebrity gossip was your secret guilty pleasure.

"So I'm a mess," you said softly when he sat down next to you, beating him to his usual job of stating the obvious. He reacted in surprise to you saying something other than how fine you were, blinking hard before he gave his head a half-shake and pressed his lips to your temple, whispering that you're the strongest fucking person he knows. And the only one who makes yellow fluorescent lighting look sexy, he added. Normally you would have rolled your eyes and told him to stop being ridiculous, but the drug cocktail in your veins was making everything softer around the edges, you included. You turned toward where his palm was cupping your cheek, kissing the spot where hand meets wrist.

"Stay." Your voice was a soft drawl, slow and heavy as you moved to let him sit down on the edge of the bed. The back of your head was resting on his shoulder and his arm was around your waist and that's how it always seemed to be with you and him, the bad and the good and no way to disentangle the two.

_{and the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we loved}_

You tried to open your eyes, then to lift your head up, but failed at both. "How drunk did you let me get?" you complained.

An unfamiliar voice snickered, and you heard Brian saying "Hey. Buddy," in a warning tone before his voice softened. "Still not drunk, babe. Hospital. Remember?"

"Ohhh. Yeah." You had a brief flash of memory, of lying there hooked up to an IV while the guy in the bed next to you pushed the call button over and over. Ding. Ding. Ding. "I'm tired."

"You're supposed to be. That's why they gave you the good stuff. You'll sleep it off and be a new person," he said, and your brain slowly chewed over his words, unable to decide what he meant by that or if that was something he really wanted.

You felt the cab come to a stop at the curb. The brakes squeaked, and something exploded in your memory. Everything was tinted red, like a movie with discolored film, but it wasn't a movie. It was you and you were her and bad things were going to happen. "Hey. Hey. I wanna tell you something."

Brian ignored how you were tugging on his sleeve and kept trying to pull you out of the cab. "Yeah, hold that thought until we get inside."

"Now," you insisted, shaking your head, because you didn't like the way this movie was making your stomach churn and this seemed like the only way to purge it from your mind. Movie-you was screaming so loud, too loud, need to make her stop. "I killed him. He was already down but I killed him anyway."

You didn't have to open your eyes to know that you now had two people watching you in confusion. "No, Liv. You didn't kill anyone. I promise. C'mon, you can't stay here all night."

Frustrated that he didn't believe you, you turned toward the driver. "I cracked his skull. On purpose. I killed him because Elliot wasn't there to do it."

You felt yourself being all but lifted up and out onto the sidewalk and ushered inside as quickly as he could urge you along. He kept promising you that you were wrong, that you were confused because nobody was dead, but you knew you were right. It was all red and the scene was swimming before you and yet there was no mistaking what you were seeing.

Now you were back in the apartment, and he was steering you toward the bedroom. You need to sleep, he said. We don't need to talk about this, he said. You're only imagining things, he said. The frustration made your chest tighten with every word he spoke. Maybe if he would just listen, the missing piece would slot itself into place, because it didn't make sense. You killed him for the hell of it, and yet there was no guilt- just the satisfaction from doing what had to be done. He couldn't hurt you, but that wasn't enough. He had to die because a part of you had to die. If he was gone, everything you had done and seen and said for the last four days disappeared with him, buried inside you and never to emerge. Stories only kept their power for as long as they continued to be told.

You tried to protest, but nothing came out. Your eyes closed again and you gave in to sleep.

When morning came, all you would remember was red.

_{I was left to my own devices_

_many days fell away with nothing to show}_

July is restless.

Against your doctor's best advice- med school, always making people think they know everything- you start running again. Not in the metaphorical sense, although you do plenty of that too. Some may even call it a specialty of yours. No, you reached for your perfectly broken in tennis shoes, the ones that had been sitting at the bottom of a suitcase ever since you came home from the hospital. You laced them up with the care worthy of this momentous reunion and when they finally connected with the pavement after such a prolonged absence, you ran.

At first it was freeing, just like it was when you were ten years old and it was the closest you could come to flying, shedding the invisible weights buried in your heart. You felt the burning of muscles stirring to life after weeks of lying dormant and the ache propelled you forward until the noise in that goddamn head of yours couldn't be heard over the rhythmic thud of your heart beating in time with your musical flavor of the moment blasting in your iPod.

If only it lasted. You scan every face as you pass by, hyper-aware of each one that looks back as if they were scorching you with their eyes._ I can always smell a victim_. You wonder what your tell is, what it is that sets you apart and how many of these strangers can recognize it with a cursory glance. How you managed to hide it before- if you ever really did. You itch to have your gun and badge back in hand, transforming you into the fearless detective and distracting attention from the person (and the fears) lying underneath. It was a disguise that had served you well. You realize that this is the longest period of time in almost two decades that you've had to go back to playing Olivia, and you think that maybe you've gotten too good at your former role, that Olivia just doesn't fit you anymore and that's why you feel like a snake struggling out of a skin that grew too tight.

You decide to forgo running for the time being and take up kickboxing as a way to channel the rage that has taken up permanent residence in every cell of your body like a fast moving cancer. There are fewer people to have to scrutinize here, and they all seem too preoccupied with their own issues to notice the brunette with the fading pink burn marks dotting her upper arms. You will unfortunately not be the first- and certainly not the last- woman to step through these doors looking a bit battered.

There's no denying that you get winded much quicker than you once did. It's temporary, you know, but that doesn't keep you from pushing yourself past the point where a more reasonable person would stop. You shake and throw up and curse your throbbing limbs and then you go right back and do it all over again because you just can't quit. You don't deserve to quit.

Brian's only response when he hears about your latest hobby is some sort of noncommittal hum, but later on he turns to you in the middle of some mindless sitcom, very carefully telling you that there was nothing you could have done differently to prevent what had happened. You close your eyes and sigh, asking if you can please not talk about this right now.

"But when?" you hear him ask behind you, the biting tone of his voice making you scowl to yourself as you go into the kitchen and mentally debate the merits of wine versus painkillers. Once you've decided, you grab a glass and the bottle and head down the hall to the bedroom to spend some quality time alone with tonight's chosen vice. Your arms are heavy, unable to stay steady as you attempt to pour, so you give up and decide to drink straight from the bottle. Might as well make it easy on yourself- the gym opens back up in ten hours, after all.

_{But if you close your eyes_

_does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?}_

July is the old and the new.

It's yet another sleepless night alone, but you've had much worse. Born to Run is playing on the stereo, you've uncorked a new bottle, and now you're settling down with your iPad in hand to admire the accessories page on the Neiman Marcus site.

Your new pastime had started out reasonably enough in searching for a pair of sunglasses. All the ones you owned were back in your apartment, and you had decided it wasn't worth the emotional toll of going to retrieve them when it was simple enough to get a new pair. They arrived the next afternoon, a welcome distraction from the tightness in your chest and the phantom hand sliding up the inside of your thigh, and you remembered how much you enjoyed the thrill of a successful hunt. Your mother had loved shopping almost as much as she loved Stoli. At least once a week she would barrel her way past the front door of the apartment and announce that "I've had a shit day, Olivia, let's go," and off you went to Saks or Bloomingdale's or wherever else struck her fancy. By the time you were fifteen or so, you began to try out that line for yourself whenever you were stressed over trig or pining after some boy in your English class, and Mom was all too happy to oblige you. She may have been drowning in debt, but that landslide also carried you to the title of Best Dressed Senior.

Now it was time for you and your own credit cards to carry on your mother's legacy. And really, didn't you deserve it? You had spent close to two decades with barely any time to attend to the absolute necessities like eating and sleeping and staying out of the grasp of serial rapists hellbent on making sure you would spend the rest of your life remembering them every time you undressed. Now that you had all these empty hours to fill, you owed it to yourself to make up for lost opportunities. No doubt Mom was smiling down on you from the big Nordstrom shoe department in the sky.

You were considering the merits of a $500 Kate Spade bag when your phone whistled to indicate that you had a new text.

«_Eli vs. stairs. Stairs won. Dad gets prize of taking losing contender to get stitches._»

You quickly typed out a sympathetic reply and got back a reminder that he had his phone on him if you needed anything and a promise to call back tomorrow night. Assuring him that you were fine, seriously, don't worry about me, you went back to deciding if you could pull off blue or should stick with black. What the hell, let's go with the blue.

Existential color crisis solved, you put aside the iPad and reached for your glass, taking a long sip. Oh, Elliot. What the fuck was this becoming, going from not speaking at all in May to 'sorry I can't call' texts in July? For someone you (thought) you knew so well, it could be awfully hard to figure out how you were supposed to act around him sometimes. And by sometimes, you meant most of the time. You had considered him your best friend for over a decade, never just your partner, but there was always that space between you. The coworker zone. You envisioned it as something akin to Elliot's stories of chaperones at Catholic school dances sticking bibles in between couples to 'save room for Jesus'. Whatever happened between you, you still had to be able to work together every day, and that played a huge part in dictating how you behaved with one another.

Now, however, the cranky teachers had packed up and left the gymnasium. You had the freedom to do whatever the hell you wanted, but you also didn't have the safety of the Old Testament wedged in between you. When he called at midnight or you met him at 'your' park bench, as had become your routine on the afternoons when you had doctor's appointments, there was no justifying it as work related. Even if it was only in your head, you had to admit you were there _because you wanted to be_.

What sort of relationship was this where you wish you could blame it all on circumstance? You already knew you were the two most emotionally stunted people on earth, but this was above and beyond. A dozen years together and you were only now learning how to be friends.

Not that it was always friendly. There was still a rift between you, and sometimes it felt like walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, trying not to fall with every measured step while denying that the chasm below you even existed. You didn't want the ugliness between you to keep quietly festering, but this, whatever this was that you had, was already fragile under the weight of two years and zero goodbyes. The cracks were visible, sharp words and biting comments meant to shake the ground under his feet when you felt like he might be getting too comfortable, because he needed to remember that he was still on the brink. He could push back, of course, remarking that you could be awfully self righteous for someone who was pretty good at running away herself. But he never went as far as to take that fatal shove, the one that would send you over the cliff into a freefall that there was no returning from, and neither did you.

He knew the truth as well as you did- if one of you slipped, you were both going down together.

You had blurted it out once, on a day when it felt like the sky might buckle under the heavy weight of the humid air, when you looked at each other and saw someone who knew just enough to tear you apart but not enough to put you back together again. "Why are you here?"

"Because you think we can't be alone together."

"I don't mean this park. I mean- what is your angle here? You said you needed to see for yourself that I was alive. Well, you saw, you can check that off your to-do list. So now what is it?"

"You know, I could ask you the same thing. Why are _you_ here? What's _your_ angle?"

The only response you could come up with was 'you started it', which was a bit immature even if he had, in fact, started it. You turned away, calmly smoothing your hair back from your face. "I know I'm sounding like Munch, but someone knows a lot more about that plane than they're letting on. Somebody's got a vested interest in making sure it won't be found."

Foreign governments had nothing on the two of you when it came to avoiding the truth.

_{we were caught up and lost in all of our vices}_

July was (not) about sex.

Contrary to what you were sure was popular belief, you had never slept with Elliot.

Nor had the thought of consummating the relationship ever consumed your every waking moment. There had been some pretty heavy flirting at times, and one late night phone conversation that had moved far, far out of the realm of flirting, but by the next morning you felt like you had been french kissing a cousin and he evidently felt the same. You both went to elaborate lengths to avoid looking at each other, talking to one another, or breathing the same air as the other until he finally tossed a folded up scrap of paper in your direction two days later.

«_want to pretend it never happened?_»

«_I don't know what you're talking about._»

You exchanged relieved smiles when he read your reply, and that was the end of it. (He had kept the note in one of his desk drawers for some reason; you came across it while scavenging through his stuff after he left). Even though you knew now that there was a definite mutual attraction, you kept the thought out of your head. Well. Most of the time. After all, you were only human. And perpetually single. And there's only so much you can do with a vibrator, and you know what he sounds like when he comes, and yes it was awkward afterward but maybe it would be different if you were actually in the same room together and...shit. Good thing you didn't think about it very often. Hardly ever, really.

Lately, though, that had changed. You still had nightmares most every time you slept, some more vivid than others, but now they had started sharing airtime with dreams of a very different kind. They varied in minor details, but the plot was always the same- Elliot pushing you down onto the mattress or up against the wall, pinning your arms above your head and sliding inside you without much in the way of preamble. It's rough, but it's not hurting you and you never think to be afraid. In fact, it feels strangely liberating, like he's fucking the demons out of you and this is what you've needed all along. You moan and writhe around like a pro and are about to lose your goddamn mind...and then you wake up, equal parts confused and so very fucking turned on. Every single time.

Then you keep thinking about it all day, of course, how he had you desperate and begging and completely overpowered and god you just _want_. You talk about it in therapy because somehow it's easier to talk about the sex you're having in dreams than the sex you're not having while you're awake. Dreams can be our brain's way of problem solving, Dr. Lindstrom says. It's a safe way of experimenting with ideas, of rehearsing possibilities, and you suppose that makes sense. It's certainly not happening in real life, where nothing you're actually okay with is doing it for you anymore and everything you want is still on the other side of a line you're not ready to cross.

But sometimes you'll look at him out of the corner of your eye while you're sitting on your bench and wonder what if, wonder how you would react.

The answer, frankly, terrifies you.

_{Great clouds roll over the hills_

_bringing darkness from above}_

July is contentious.

Everything seems to be a fight these days. If there's a way to disagree about it, whatever 'it' may be, you and Brian will find it and seize upon it.

Dr. Lindstrom talks to you about misplaced anger. Who are you really angry at, Brian asks one night as you pace back and forth across the living room, lecturing him on how many times do I have to tell you to _not_ drop the keys on the counter like that, Jesus fucking christ, it's like you don't even _think_ sometimes. You refuse to answer his question because it's not that simple, you can be angry with a whole universe all at once (like you are now), and every time he says something like that a little more of your rage is pointed squarely at him. Smug bastard doesn't seem to understand how patronizing that shit is, how you can hear the implication that he is somehow blameless and that is simply not true.

After all, he's learning how to throw down just as well as you can. He asks how the hell you think you're going to be able to survive back at work, because no one's ever going to be able to remember your whole ridiculous list of do's and don'ts. No one wants to tiptoe around trying not to find out what will set you off this time. You focus on making him spontaneously combust from the heat of your glare as his voice lowers and he says honestly, Liv, how are you _not_ going to lose it the first time you're back in the room with someone who's getting a rape kit done, let's be real here.

You nod once, curtly, and turn to walk out the door with all the silent composure you can muster. You don't even slam it behind you, instead closing it so carefully that you can barely hear the click of the knob.

He doesn't get to hear you cry anymore.

_{How am I gonna be an optimist about this?}_

He's waiting for you at the door when you come back like he hasn't moved since you left. He says he's so sorry, and he kisses you like he means it. You know he does. You also know that there's nothing to apologize for- after all, he's only taking the ugly doubts that already live in your head and throwing them back at you. He has no way of knowing. You've never told him what you're afraid of and he's never asked.

Sometimes you wish he would, because you honestly can't predict what would come out of your mouth. Could be a delightful surprise for both of you.

The next morning you turn to look at him from over the giant pillow separating you and tell him this isn't working, that it's time for you to go back home. He starts to protest but you remind him that this was never meant to be permanent, that it happened because it was the only real option at the time and you both know you wouldn't have considered living together right then otherwise. The whole agreement was that you weren't rushing things this time around- it took almost four months of casual dates before you actually slept together, and although it had been an exclusive thing the whole time, it took six more months for you both to acknowledge that it was, in fact, a thing. Even then, the whole conversation literally consisted of him looking at you from across a table strewn with takeout containers and saying "So. You and me. This is a thing, right?" You nodded and said "Yeah, definitely," and that was the end of that. It wasn't your most eloquent moment, the question having caught you completely off guard, but it was all the answer either of you needed.

Under normal circumstances, it was a fine arrangement for two commitmentphobes trying not to fuck up a good thing for a second time. Key word being normal. Now those days seemed so long ago that you can't even remember who those people were and why they thought they had an infinite amount of time to figure shit out. Lucky bastards.

I don't want to lose this, you admit to him softly, and I know that's where we're headed. His eyes look like they're searching for the right words to jump out in front of him, but they're nowhere to be found. He knows that he'd be lying if he disagreed, so he just reaches toward the arm you have slung over the pillow, kissing the back of your hand.

Tomorrow you will be on your own.


	5. The Way It Was

And so here it is as promised- a (short) part to take us up to the end of Surrender Benson. The next part will probably pick up a few episodes into season 15, so it will probably be longer in coming than this part was because I need to rewatch and refresh my memory.

A/N: references to (consensual) sex and past violence. You know the drill. Title and quotes from The Way It Was by the Killers.

Thank you once more to everyone who has taken the time to comment- even a one word comment seriously makes me so happy. :)

* * *

_{maybe a thief stole your heart}_

Alone.

Your apartment is quiet now except for the sound of your breath, loud gasps as you inhale and soft ragged shudders as you breathe out. That you are breathing at all seems miraculous in and of itself. Whether you want to be- well, that's another question.

You are sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, head tilted against the wall as you try to arrange your thoughts into some sort of order. Everything around you and inside you was in disarray, scattered and broken and there were so many places to begin repairing that the idea of having to choose one was overwhelming.

Brian had already been given orders to leave. In some ways, you think it had been harder for him to walk through that door than it was for you. He was the one who had been there before, having made a side trip on his way to take you home from the hospital, but you could tell that he had been too caught up in the chaos of his own mind to notice what was going on around him. Only now was he truly seeing it all for the first time.

You, though- you knew what to expect. You walked these floors every day in your memory. Just like now, when you get up and head down the hall to stand in the doorway to your bedroom. The mattress is gone from the bed, along with all the blankets and pillows, but you still remember. Being pushed backward. Hitting your head against the corner of the bedside table and feeling the warmth spread as blood flows onto the pillow underneath you. His hands are fumbling with the button on your pants and you're screaming in your mind but all you can do is squeeze your eyes closed as tight as you can and wait. And then nothing. Waiting. An unexpected blow across the face has you recoiling in shock._ «Is that what you wanted, bitch?» _He disappears back down the hall and you struggle to lift your head up, straining to see or hear anything that might give you a clue about his next move because you know he sure as hell isn't about to leave. Footsteps getting closer, quick, shut your eyes. He's not interested if he thinks you've passed out. _«it's okay, I can get creative.»_ Don't move, don't move._ «you're gonna wish to god I would've just fucked you» _and then...

No. Nonono. You shake your head almost violently, turning away and deliberately not looking past the open bathroom door. But it's still happening. Being shoved against the wall, the gash on your head barely avoiding contact with the tile. His hands are everywhere they shouldn't be. He tries to kiss you but you turn at exactly the right moment and bite down on the side of his cheek, hard. It buys you a few precious seconds, enough to get past him and back out into the hall, but he recovers too quickly. He grabs onto your ankle and your chin takes the brunt of the fall as you pitch forward onto the floor. Now he's on your back, holding you down, forcing you to turn over so you're looking at him. Your mouth is bleeding from biting your tongue and ohgodohgod close your eyes can't look he's hurting you and there's blood so much blood don't scream you're dead if you scream _«bet you won't forget me now»_ can't look don't look…

No more.

_{Back then this thing was running on momentum love and trust_

_that paradise is buried in the dust}_

"So you're going back to his place."

"Yeah." You and Elliot are sitting side by side on the couch, shoulders and knees touching, both staring straight ahead at some unidentified point on the moonlit wall of your apartment.

"Because you want to or because you think you have to?"

"Don't. Just...don't." You suspect part of him was perversely disappointed that your tearful call earlier in the night had nothing to do with Brian. "He's good to me."

"You keep saying. But where is he now?"

"He didn't want me to leave." And you couldn't let him stay here, not with that haunted look in his eyes that you recognized from every time a car engine backfires out on the street. The fourth of July had been a shitstorm, both taking turns exploding at one another until night came and the sky took over for you, echoes ricocheting back and forth between buildings. You brought him a bottle of scotch and turned the tv up and mentally vowed that you two would go away for the holiday next year. Only one of you could break at a time and you couldn't let it be him, not when you were doing such an excellent job of fulfilling that role already.

"But he-"

"Enough. Drop it."

He sighs in exasperation, and it must be the same sound his kids make when they're being lectured about staying out past curfew. You ignore him and look around the room at stacks of boxes that look like islands in a sea of destruction. When you called him, you had been frantically pacing from room to room, torn between the urge to flee and the knowledge that once you left, you wouldn't be coming back. I need you, you had said. Not_ I need you to take a look at this file_, or_ I need you to wake me up in a half hour_, or even _I need you to quit sabotaging every date I've ever had._ I need you. Full stop. Period. End of subject.

"I. I appreciate all this," you say, nodding in the general direction of the piles the two of you had created. You had heard someone say once that you find out who your real friends are when you ask them to help you move. It made you wonder what the hell would be the proper title for the person who helps you move in the middle of the night with no advance notice. Probably hasn't even been created yet.

"I'm glad you called. Not, I mean, I'm not glad about all this-" he gestures around the room, suddenly looking like he was afraid he had frightened off some skittish little woodland creature. "But I know it couldn't have been easy for you and...I don't take that lightly."

You fidget uncomfortably, laughing softly to try and deflect attention from your embarrassment. "Eh. My therapist says I'm supposed to practice accepting help when I need it."

"Smart man. You like him?"

"I do. But sometimes...I'm not sure that it's working. The whole therapy thing."

"Give it time. It's a process."

"Oh?" you ask, curious.

Now it was his turn to look uncomfortable. "From personal experience, yeah."

And curiouser still. "Yeah?"

A tight nod. "After...everything. I had a lot of free time and not a hell of a lot to lose. Our priest suggested a guy. Ex-military. He's good at calling me out on my shit."

"Someone has to," you agree.

"But not as good as you. Don't worry."

That earns him a little smile. "Do you talk about me?"

"Sometimes. You?"

"Sometimes."

"What a pair we are." Your entire arm is resting against his now, and there's no reason for you to sit this close together but there's really no reason not to either.

_{I wonder if you feel it too_

_it's like we're going under}_

The sky has turned that navy hue that signals sunrise isn't far off. "What did you tell Kathy?"

"I didn't. She was already asleep so I just left a note."

"And that's gonna go over well, I bet."

"Liv, I told you. Let me handle it," he chastises gently. "I'm not worried about that right now."

You raise one eyebrow, skeptical. "But maybe you should be."

"_I_ will take care of it," he insists, fingers brushing the back of your hand.

"But I-"

"Liv. Listen to me?"

"Yeah?"

His palm is covering your hand and you realize that you can't remember the last time the two of you had actually touched. "Shut up. Trust me on this."

You laugh quietly, fondly, at being told to shut up, but there is still something inside of you that feels small and sad. If only it was as easy as that.

«~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~»

"She was the one who told me," he says after a few minutes of silence.

You are confused by the non-sequitur. "Who?"

"Kathy. She was the one who found out about," he tilts his head somewhere in the direction of the door, as if that would provide any information at all, "before I did."

"Oh," you say, for lack of anything better.

"We were in Mexico. Maureen and her husband are living down there for the year...we went to this beach town that was pretty much off the grid. But she was able to get online and she saw- she and Kathy, they decided not to tell me. Didn't want me thinking about it when there was nothing I could do. They were trying to decide when to, but. She found out you were." He swallows hard, rubbing his forehead. "Alive. So Kathy told me right before we were about to get on the flight back home. And I...uh. I'm probably not welcome in Mexico City's airport ever again."

You wince, suddenly very interested in a scratch on the flooring.

"Did you know that anger is a symptom of wanting to be in control?" he asks, and you've given up on trying to follow where this conversation is headed, other than proving that he truly had been listening to his shrink. "When we feel like we're powerless over a situation, our natural instinct is to get angry."

You think about breaking glass and burnt toast and slamming doors and _«who are you really angry at, Liv?»_. "I...don't know why you're telling me this."

"Because I can't stand thinking that...fuck!" he swears, slamming his fist against the table beside him, and it's good to see that therapy hasn't changed him _that_ much, "You have to know that I would've been out there. I would've tracked you down myself."

Your fingers are interlaced now, and it's that time of day where it's either very late or very early and every word that's spoken seems heavy with significance. "I don't want to talk about this any more."

"You have to know!"

"Know _what_?"

"I wouldn't have left you out there!"

"There was nothing you could have done," you say in a dull monotone, and it was like a game of telephone with you relaying the message you had been given so many times.

"It could. It could have been different."

_{all of our plans have fallen through_

_sometimes a dream, it don't come true}_

"So no word from loverboy yet?"

Despite the joking, his voice is so deflated that he sounds like a little kid whose balloon has just burst. You don't even bother to come up with a halfhearted retort. "He's still at work. He'll call when he's back home and I'll talk to him then. We'll figure out what to do with all-" you wave your hand toward your collected boxes- "this. I just need to get the hell out of here, shit."

"We can go somewhere and wait," he offers.

"Nah. Tired." You rub at your eyes with the heel of your left hand, because your right hand hasn't moved from underneath his. He's warm against your side and your head is lolling toward him and the first streaks of yellow are peeking up over the horizon.

You can sense that he's about to say something even without the benefit of looking at him. "You don't sleep, do you. When you tell me you're going to bed at night."

"No," you mouth silently, too exhausted for sound.

He sighs, and you think you're about to get a lecture until he reaches for your shoulder and nudges you sideways, shifting both of you until your head is in his lap. "Sleep."

You try to protest, but then his hand is in your hair, and your brain expects your body to react in fear but it just. Doesn't.

When you fall asleep, you don't dream.

_{if I go on with you by my side_

_can it be the way it was when we met?}_

You are a coward.

It's the only reasonable explanation for why you couldn't even call Brian when you woke up. Instead, you sent a one line text: _«I want to come back»_ and then closed your eyes and held onto your phone with the grip of someone at risk of taking a twenty story plunge. And in a way, maybe you were. Maybe all you can really do is pray you'll pass out from the fall so you won't feel the impact.

The phone whistles and something in your heart clenches at the response.

_«come back. i'm waiting»_

_«~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~»_

You haven't cried in front of Brian in weeks, save for the nights when you wake up in tears and make a hasty retreat into the bathroom, telling yourself he didn't notice. In an impressive show of self control, that all went to shit as soon as he opened the door. You could hear him murmuring reassurances with his lips pressed against the top of your head, could feel his arms wrapped around your back as you sobbed freely for the second time in as many days. He promised that the two of you would make this work somehow. I want you here, I swear, we'll figure it out. We'll find a new place and start over. Something bigger, something that's both of ours. It'll get better.

You're not an idiot. You know that a new address and a couple hundred extra square feet won't change anything, but you just need something to believe in right now, and real estate is maybe the only choice you have. People have placed all their faith in less, you suppose. It certainly has to be safer than putting your trust in the hands of another human being.

The rest of the day is spent nestled together while looking at apartment listings. He doesn't ask what made you decide to come back and you don't offer to explain, focused instead on making a list of places to check out and browsing furniture sites. You want a new living room set, you think, but then it might not match the bedroom furniture. Might as well replace all that too. You'll leave it all behind, leave this place like you left yours and start over somewhere without the ghosts of sleepless nights and angry words. It'll be a new life, and you'll have someone waiting for you at night, someone who exists in more than shadows and memories and missed goodbyes.

You both start drinking sometime in the late afternoon, so by the time night falls you are buzzed enough that your body feels loose and boneless as you trade dopey smiles. He's further gone than you are, you realize when you see the flush spreading across the side of his neck, and the knowledge leaves you feeling suddenly very brave. When he wanders into the kitchen, you go back to the bedroom and yank off your shirt and pants without bothering to close the door behind you.

The bedroom windows have blackout curtains on them, a necessity for someone trying to sleep despite the afternoon sun, but they've stayed open at your insistence for two months now. You pull them closed before slipping on an oversized t-shirt and shoving aside your giant pillow to crawl into bed.

"Hey, it's dark," he says, and you're just drunk enough to laugh. You listen to him fumble around in the bathroom, watching until you're sure he took his contacts out. He's been making noises about getting laser surgery and you're still trying to come up with a way to dissuade him other than telling him flat out that his chances of getting laid in the future are hinging on him having less than 20/20 vision.

It doesn't take long for him to notice your bare legs once he's in bed next to you, and you laugh again at what you imagine must be a surprised expression concealed by the darkness. When his hand wanders down below your hipbone and you don't bat it away, he takes that as a cue to keep going, palm splayed out midway down your thigh and fingers tracing patterns across your skin as you kissed.

You prop your legs up with your feet flat on the mattress, sighing contentedly as his hand skimmed up the back of your leg from the ankle to the curve of your ass and then down again. Your eyes flutter closed as he repeats the motion. "God, yeah, that's good," you say, back already arching slightly.

He pauses when you feel his lips pressed right above your knee, and you nod restlessly, eyes still closed. Now he's kissing up the inside of your thigh slowly, warm little puffs of breath against soft skin as he laughs. "Are you going to be patient here or not?" he asks with a wicked smile as you look up at him.

When you don't answer, he leans forward to whisper in your ear, bracing himself with his hands on either side of your head. Most of your past flames couldn't or wouldn't talk dirty to you beyond a few cliche phrases, but this man right here had a talent and knew how to use it to maximum effect. You hiss as you grip onto his shoulder and try to nudge him back down while he pretends not to notice. He keeps talking to you in a low voice, distracting you from the hand that had moved back between your legs, until his knuckles brush deliberately against you and you groan in surprise.

"Fuck...oh, fuck," you moan as he goes back to kissing your inner thighs, enthralled by the idea of looking at them the next day and seeing fresh bruises drawing your attention away from angry red burn scars. Your whole body is shaking by the time his mouth has made it all the way up, nosing at the inner crease of one leg, then the other, then mouthing at the thin fabric between them.

Now his fingers take over where his mouth had been, stroking lightly, and it's insane that he's not even actually touching you but still you haven't felt so good in fucking forever. You tense up a little as he starts kissing low across your stomach where your shirt has ridden up, but he notices and goes back to your legs before you can say anything. It's not long until you're close, so close oh holy shit, and then you sit up so you're straddling his lap as you move to finish yourself off. All it takes is a few seconds of rubbing at your clit before you're coming hard, biting at his shoulder while he talks you through it.

Later on, after you've fulfilled your obligation as a girlfriend (you will never let him live that down), he hugs you close and says that it's all going to be okay, that things are about to get better.

You are tempted to believe him.

_{the question of my heart came to my mind}_

"Liv?"

You can tell he's not awake, his face buried in the pillow and his voice sing-song in that way that sleepy drunk people have. "Yeah?"

"I wanted you to stay."

You close your eyes and curl up on your side, feeling around in the dark for his hand. "There wasn't part of you that wanted me to go?"

"Yeah. But more of me wanted you to stay."

Once again you would sleep without dreaming.

_{can it be the way it was?}_


	6. Devil In Me

Well, well. I didn't expect to be back so soon, but this was getting long somehow...funny how that happens. So this takes place right before/during/after Imprisoned Lives, and the next part will pick back up right before Internal Affairs. (I will never make it through the entire season at this rate, clearly!)

And for anyone who has asked what the endgame is here ship-wise...that has yet to be determined. I have several different scenarios in my head- who knows, who knows.

Same warnings as always. Sorry, Elliot fans, he's a bit scarce in this. I'll make up for it later. Title and quotes from Shake It Out by Florence and the Machine.

Thank you to everyone who comments- you make me smile. :)

* * *

_{I'm ready to suffer and I'm ready to hope}_

"So this moving thing, it's official?"

Elliot is smirking like he's never been quite so amused, but you tilt your chin stubbornly in his direction and refuse to be baited. "It is."

"Should I be watching the mailbox for a wedding invite next?"

"You automatically assume you would be invited," you counter, sipping at your coffee and pushing your sunglasses back down over your eyes to block out the harsh late afternoon glare.

"Well, yeah," he says, as if there was never any doubt.

"Why would I do that when I know you'd only be there to drink all my liquor and make an ass of yourself?"

"I dunno, I just figured I'd be the one walking you down the aisle."

"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" It pains you slightly just imagining it. "No one is walking me down the aisle. I don't need to feel like I'm being handed off from one man to another, and- why are we even talking about this? There's no wedding. Sorry to disappoint."

"You're sure? Shit, I never even thought I'd live to see the day...you're positive you want to do this? Sharing space with someone like that, it's a whole new ballgame. Things get tense."

"El, I lived in a sorority house for three years. You name it, I've seen it. I know drama."

He shakes his head in that way he always does when he feels like he has some sort of superior knowledge. "That's different. You've never lived with someone you're dating. It changes everything."

You think back to the summer between your junior and senior year of college, when you had it out with your mother ten days into the break and made the decision that you couldn't put up with that shit every day until August. Off you went to crash at your boyfriend's apartment, and all was well- until the wife you didn't know he had showed up six weeks later. You came back to the city heartbroken, because you were young and stupid and had been so sure you were going to prove Mom wrong with _this_ guy, and now you were trapped listening to 'I told you so, you little slut, you never learn' for the next month.

You decide against sharing this story, which is maybe not the best showcase of your ability to have a functional relationship. "Fine, I'll consider myself warned. Now I need to get going- I'm back at work tomorrow."

He turns from you and tosses an empty plastic cup toward a rusty trash can a few yards away, watching as it bounces off the rim and into the tiny hole at the top. "Back saving the world," he says, voice barely audible. "What's Junior think about all this? You talk to him about it yet?"

Elliot hadn't seemed to want to know too much about the goings-on of the squad in his absence, but he was willing to hear about Junior- aka Nick- once you had proved to his satisfaction that Nick had never made a move on you and vice versa (although hearing that he wasn't a Brian fan was probably what truly won Elliot over). Privately you wondered if he knew much more about your new partner than he let on. He had a way of working his connections to get whatever info he wanted, and you couldn't believe that he wouldn't at least try to get Nick's address so he could show up at his door in the middle of the night and warn him about touching things that didn't belong to him.

"Nick came over the other day and we talked for a while. He said if I feel like I'm ready, then he'll support me." He was the first person from the squad that you had seen since the day you left the hospital, and you were thankful to have marked that milestone in private rather than in the house for the entire precinct to witness. You hadn't expected it to be such an emotional reunion, but when you opened the door to him you were overcome by the memory of him crouching down in front of you in that awful house, voice soft and hand extended until you decided it was safe to reach out and take it. He was going to take you home, he promised when you asked him, and his eyes were shining then just like they were when you let him into the apartment and pulled him into a tight hug. "Thank you, thank you," you had whispered, repeating the words you had been too overcome to say to him that day.

"And you trust him," Elliot says, looking at you for confirmation.

"Absolutely." Any doubts you may have had about how it might affect your future relationship as partners vanished when you finally let go of him and he pressed a wad of kleenex into your hand, jokingly asking you not to cry because then he would have to join in and you might start to doubt his masculinity. He knew that you hated making yourself that vulnerable, especially after he had already seen you at your worst, and gave you the chance to save face by not letting things get overly sentimental. "He's good people. He's not you, but it's...it's. Yeah. Never mind, I really need to go. Really."

He just nods, arms folded and staring at the toes of his shoes.

"El," you say, emboldened by the way he was avoiding eye contact. "Remember, uh. What you said when I first got here. What you told me to swear I'd do."

The discomfort in your voice gets his attention. "Hmm?"

"I'll do it. But after I go…"

"Yeah, yeah. Drinks on me."

_{every demon wants his pound of flesh  
__but I like to keep some things to myself}_

You're lying on your side on the couch, hugging your knees to your chest to make yourself as small as possible, when Brian walks in. "Hey- I thought you were working."

"Does it look like I am?"

He ignores your prickly reply and sits down near your feet. "So what happened?"

"Nothing, that's what happened! I go in, I'm there long enough for everyone to get a look, and then I get sent home because apparently that's all anyone thinks I'm capable of." You realized as soon as you walked through the doors that you are the one-six's very own minor celebrity. For all you had worried about how the people closest to you would react, you hadn't given much thought to everyone else. You knew your little adventure had garnered some amount of media attention, but you had been too busy being nearly catatonic to notice when the frenzy was at its peak. Once you had (unfortunately) rejoined the land of the living, the 24 hour news cycle had mostly exhausted itself and went on to milk all it could from someone else's suffering, and Brian had been careful to shield you from whatever press scrutiny remained.

But now you were back in the world, back on public display. It was the same feeling that led you to quit running, the sense that everyone you passed could see through to the ugliest parts of you, only this time you were dealing with people who you encountered every day and who knew exactly who you were.

"What, did someone say something?" he asks, confused.

"They don't need to! Do you know what it's like to look at someone you've barely met and _know_ what they're thinking about you? No, you don't."

He rubbed at the back of his neck, buying time to come up with a reply. "What are they thinking?"

"They're thinking I was raped. That's all everyone's wondering, you know?"

"Why would that be the only thing they're thinking about?"

Christ, this man. Maybe he really is as much of an idiot as Elliot always says he is. You try to explain that you know how people are. You know how this works, and you know what you saw, and all he's doing is biting his lip and nodding continuously like one of those bobblehead things and it only makes you step your diatribe up a notch. It is sickening enough that you let that monster get to you, that he carved out a place for himself on your skin and in your head. It is worse yet that you undoubtedly live on in his mind, that he gets to keep a part of you and no matter how much you may think you've moved on, there will always be that one piece that you are helpless to recover. He shouldn't get to keep that. He has no right. But the worst thing of all is that it goes beyond you and him. He's left you exposed and vulnerable, and he's left the door open so that everyone around you can get a little piece of their own. A regular fucking free for all.

You could try to explain all of this to Brian. You could tell him about going to a plastic surgeon yesterday and giving another stranger the grand tour of your injuries, only for the doctor to tell you that there's really nothing to be done surgically that wouldn't risk making the scars look even worse, but he'd be happy to inject you full of shit that may or may not change anything. You could tell him about your conversation with Barba and how he said he can't in good conscience keep pushing for a closed courtroom when this goes to trial, not when it would be like handing that bastard the ideal grounds for an appeal in a neatly wrapped package.

You could try and explain any of these things- but you've already had too many pieces of yourself taken from you today, and it feels safer to rant and swear about people who may as well be raping you with their eyes.

Once again, you'll take the safer route.

He gives you the look the waiter gives you when they come over to your table to say I'm sorry, but we're actually out of the shrimp today. "Liv. I get what you're saying." No, he does not. "And I get that people always want the gory details, but I don't know that the only thing they're thinking- or even the first thing- is that you were raped."

"I wasn't," you snap, abruptly sitting up and backing away from him as far as you can. "I was not, and if you ever fucking say that again, I swear to God I'll-"

"Okay. Okay. I believe you," he says, hands up in surrender.

"That's generous of you, thanks." Your tone is drenched with sarcasm in case he thought you truly appreciated the vote of confidence. "So all this time, you're thinking that-"

He just will not let you finish a sentence today. "I'm thinking that you'll tell me when you're ready to tell me. And I'm thinking...if you were, if you weren't. It doesn't make what you _did_ go through any better or worse, so as far as all that, I guess it's not really important to me."

You stand up and go over to the other side of the room, slapping your palms against the wall in indignation. "It's not important to you! That's fucking great. I'm so glad you feel that way."

"Now what the hell did I say?" he asks, clearly feeling like he is the aggrieved party here.

"Whether or not...it's important to _me_, okay, and honestly, I don't expect you to get it."

"You're right, I don't get it. But how the fuck would I? You shut me out completely and then get pissed when I can't read your mind. You're too stubborn to talk to me, and what does that accomplish? You let these things build up and then you have this whole irrational explosion where I have no idea what the hell you're on about and we end up screaming at each other. What is it that you're getting out of this?"

You didn't hear a word of his question. "You think I'm being irrational," you say, and you're about to either laugh or cry or slap him or do all three simultaneously.

"Right now, yeah. A little. I really don't think that anyone's lying awake at night wondering what happened to you. I feel like you're getting yourself worked up over something that's only in your head."

"Don't you _dare_ psychoanalyze me. Don't you dare."

"No, you know what else? I think you _like_ being angry. I think it's an easy way to avoid having to actually deal with what's bothering you," and shit, he's obviously been saving these gems of wisdom up for a while, "like whatever this is, it's not about what other people are thinking, it's about you needing a reason to get pissed off to distract yourself from whatever the hell is really going on."

"Have you been rehearsing this? Just waiting for the perfect moment to show me how insightful you are?"

"I don't need to wait! We do this same thing every goddamn day!"

You are turned away from him, forehead resting against the wall, and you're briefly tempted to start headbutting it in the hope that it would shake everything in your mind loose. It would all disintegrate, break down like rocks becoming little grains of sand, able to be easily swept out into the ocean's abyss. "What do you want from me," you mumble.

"I want us to be able to talk to each other."

You think back to early summer, with him accusing you of pushing him away and you wanting so desperately to have the courage to let yourself break in front of him. In retrospect you wonder if you had let your best opportunity pass by. Reopening a fresh wound can be as simple and mindless as picking off a scab. It bleeds a little, but only on the surface layer, and in a few days a new one has formed in place of the old. But if you've left the wound alone for a while, reopening it will be a deliberate and painful process. You'll have to work harder, cut deeper. It'll get ugly. No tiny beads of blood that you can slap a bandaid over this time. If anything, it will be harder to heal than the original because of what you've exposed it to while opening it back up.

It is a disgusting metaphor, but it's a disgusting situation. "What if we can't?" you ask, voice still soft.

"We used to, didn't we?" He pauses for so long that you almost look behind yourself to see if he's still there. "I used to think...I thought I had finally figured you out, you know, and then you come back a completely different person. And I don't know what to do anymore."

Now you really do move to face him, eyes stinging with tears that you force not to fall. "And what, you want an apology for that? I mean, I'm not arguing with you- but if all you're doing is waiting around for the old me to come back, I'm sorry, but I think you're fucked."

"I'm not." He shifts his weight from one foot to another uncomfortably. "Look, if this is about the whole 'it's not important' thing, you have to know I didn't mean it like that, like I don't care what happens to you."

"Oh for Christ's sake, you think I don't know that?"

"When it comes to you? No, I never know what the hell to think," he says. "But I'm glad, I mean, for what you told me, don't get me wrong."

"That I wasn't raped? Wow. Thanks."

He throws his hands up in frustration and very nearly misses hitting himself in the head. "See? I give up. You're not even trying."

"Do you seriously want to know?" you ask. "Because no, I wasn't raped. But that...goddamnit. It's not just because of luck or chance or anything like that, okay? You have _no_ idea what happened or what I did, and you say you want to know but- you don't. Trust me. You really don't." He wouldn't understand that you literally made a deal with the devil, and for what? To be able to say you're not your mother and you won't be and her story will never be yours?

"Liv." He takes a single step toward you, cautiously, and then another. "You can tell me, I swear to God."

You've said too much already. "No. Stop asking." You don't know why you ever thought it would make it easier somehow. Congratulations, history didn't repeat itself, you can sleep soundly tonight- but you don't. And you won't, not as long as you can still hear _«you beg for it like a whore, jesus, does that boyfriend of yours not get you off?»_ in your dreams.

He's telling you that he means it, that he wants to help if you'd give him the chance, and you're tempted to scream that he has no fucking idea what he wants and neither do you.

"You want to help? Then leave me the fuck alone. _Please_." You push your way past him into the bathroom, locking the door behind you and leaning against it to steady yourself.

"Glad we talked!" he shouts, but it's not sarcasm in his voice, it's hurt.

_{it's a fine romance but it's left me so undone}_

You don't know how long you stay shut in your hideout before you hear him knock. "C'mon," he calls out quietly, "I'm gonna get some sleep for a few hours before I have to head back."

"Be there in a second," you say, getting up from where you had been sitting on the edge of the tub.

To the outside observer it would seem like something was missing, like reading a book with pages torn out, but this was just how the two of you operated. You raged at each other, stormed off to nurse your wounded pride alone, and then carried on as if nothing had happened, never to speak of it again. As for right now- he's still angry at you, there's no doubt about it, but he also knows you are exhausted and you won't be able to sleep without him. Not that you would admit as much as you crawl into bed, careful not to look in his direction, unsure if you want to thank him for the gesture or hate him for making you need him that much.

When you reach out toward him, he takes your hand in his without hesitation. You wonder about this thing between you, if it's love or pity or codependence, and you decide you don't want to think about it any more for today.

_{regrets collect like old friends  
__here to relive your darkest moments}_

"I'm tired of being treated like I'm about to break."

You think Dr. Lindstrom is a bit surprised to see you show up in his office again after you'd been given your psychiatric clearance. He probably figured that you had played along just enough to get what you wanted, and now that you were cleared to go back to work, you would decide that this whole therapy thing wasn't getting you anywhere. (If he had that idea, it was because of what you had told him at the end of your last visit- 'I don't think I'm getting anywhere.')

"What made you decide to come back?" he had asked.

"Someone told me I needed to trust the process," you said, remembering conversations in the dark and _«what a pair we make»_ and falling asleep at dawn with a comforting familiar hand tangled in your hair.

He scribbles something down on his notepad as you talk about how the rest of the squad seems to be intent on shielding you from anything they deem too upsetting. You're stuck dealing with the leftovers, spending your days on winners like a guy who felt that masturbating in a bakery was covered by his First Amendment rights and was threatening to sic the ACLU on you at any minute now.

"'You're too raw'. That's the kind of shit I keep hearing, like they're waiting for me to grow a thicker skin, and I think," you say, getting louder with every word, "that _I'm_ the one who's seen someone murdered in front of me. I've seen a man murdered and his wife raped and there was no one there to protect me then, you know, so don't fucking tell me now that I need a thicker skin."

He considers this. "You said there was no one there to protect you. Do you think that's weighing on their minds? Like they feel that they failed and so they need to overcompensate now because of the guilt?"

"Why should that be my problem?" you ask, standing up and walking over to the window, gazing at the grey clouds covering the sky. "I've got my own guilt. I've got people I let down too, but you don't see me dumping my issues on them, do you?"

"Who did you let down?"

You twist the ring on your finger anxiously, sidestepping the question. "I had blacked out. When I woke up, the car had stopped, and he opened the trunk and was looking down at me. I could see a house, and he tells me we're here. It...I thought he had found the place where he was going to kill me and. And," you stammer, voice breaking.

"Stay with it," he says, quiet and steady. "Then what happens?"

You tell him about your knees not being able to support your weight once you were on solid ground and how he had grabbed you and carried you the rest of the way inside when he decided you weren't moving fast enough for his liking. You talk about staring at the green grass, at tiny yellow flowers, wondering if that would be your last memory of the world outside this unfamiliar house.

"And then we're inside, and he locks the door behind us. He's pointing the gun at my head and he. He says if I try anything, if I even blink wrong, that he'll make me regret it. That I'll be begging him to just kill me. And I believed him."

"Of course you did. You knew what he was capable of," Dr. Lindstrom says, giving you a reassuring nod.

"Once we were in the house...he. We went to. Fuck, I'm sorry. I can't anymore, I need to stop." You cover your mouth with your hand, shuddering as you try to speak. "I saw it all. I saw and I didn't do anything."

"You did what you had to do to stay alive," he suggests. "You survived until you had the chance to save yourself, and it's because of what you did that he's not still out there."

"No. I should have. I didn't..."

"Olivia," he says gently. "You were tied up, you had been injured. You were barely conscious. So realistically, what do you think you could have done to change the situation?"

With your back still turned away from him, your shoulders shake as you rub at your watery eyes. "I didn't do anything. I didn't even try. I couldn't move. It was like I was watching from outside my body, like none of it was real."

"You were in shock- that's a normal reaction."

"Do you know what I was thinking?!" you ask, turning around abruptly. "The whole time. All I could think of was how tired I was, and how much everything hurt, and. And. T-that I was so goddamn relieved that he was finally leaving me alone for a few fucking minutes!" You can't stop crying now, but there's a sick sort of relief in it, like you've rid yourself of a poison flowing through your veins. "You can't write that. Don't write that down. Don't."

"It stays between you and me," he promises, looking thoughtful, and he's quiet for a moment. "This is what I'm thinking, Olivia. All your life, you've been the one who saves everybody else, haven't you? Even at your own expense. That's a huge part of how you define yourself. So when something like that happens- it throws everything you think you know about yourself into question. But...there's something else I'm wondering."

"Yeah?"

"Do you think that _you_ are worth saving?"

You don't answer.

_{I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't  
__so here's to drinks in the dark at the end of my road}_

An hour later, you brush one last stray tear off your cheek and take a final glance in the mirror to check your freshly reapplied eyeliner. Once you fish your phone out of your new bag- you're so happy you chose the blue one after all-you send a quick text and wait.

_«I went, el, so I guess drinks are on you today»_

_«then get your ass over here before I change my mind»_


	7. Like Water

**Read me:** Sooo...this is something a little different than usual. I've been dealing with a family emergency for the past ten days or so, which has given me a lot of time to fill while sitting around and waiting. I've ended up using that time to clean up something I'd started earlier and had scrapped for reasons...so instead of vignettes, this is just one longer narrative. No Elliot- but stick with me, because there *will* be plenty of Elliot feels next time, I promise you. So if you like this, great! If you don't, no worries, because I'm going back to vignettes after this.

Warnings for references to violence and (consensual) sex. Beware of bears. Title and quotes from _A Lifetime_ by Better Than Ezra. Summary, of course, comes courtesy of CCR.

* * *

_{and you move like water  
__I could drown in you  
__and I fell so deep once  
__until you pulled me through  
__you would tell me  
__"no one is allowed to be so proud  
__that they never reach out when they're giving up"}_

The last weekend of August is almost unbearably humid. A hot wind blows without stopping and the sun refuses to shine, concealed by black clouds that promise rain but never make good on that threat.

Fortunately, the stars are also in some sort of once in a lifetime alignment and you and Brian actually both have the same weekend completely off. You bid farewell to your overheated apartment, currently a monument to cardboard boxes and packing tape and several pairs of scissors that seem to vanish at will, and set out for this house a few hours upstate that has been in his family for generations. It is positively tiny and the electricity is less than reliable, but it is at least ten degrees cooler up there and you don't have to see a single other human being if you don't want to.

Neither of you want to. You barely want to see each other, not that you've been doing much of that lately in the first place. For once you are actually home more than he is, Cragen being on one of those let's-play-by-the-rules binges he goes through whenever you crazy kids do something that attracts the attention of the overlords at 1PP. You get sent home every time there's a lull in the action, and your long-suffering captain just shrugs and says it's out of his hands when you complain. Officially, you've only been cleared for 30 hours a week, and there's a limit to how much he can overlook.

Being alone in the apartment gets increasingly uncomfortable as things get packed away, as if the more inanimate objects you could surround yourself with, the better protected you would be. You're not even exactly sure what the powers that be think you are gaining from this whole part time thing. All that they've done is give you extra time to think, and that is much more dangerous than any pervert out roaming the streets could be. You distract yourself by planning how you're going to organize your new kitchen and you debate whether your mismatched dishes would take away from the aesthetic of the dining room. They really would, you finally decide. In a matter of a few clicks, you have a new set, bright white with platinum edges that will look perfect on your new table.

Brian comes through the door and shakes his head when he sees you with credit card in hand. "You're gonna have to find places to put all that shit," he warns, nodding toward the rapidly growing corner of the living room where you stack all your recent purchases, but you know he is content as long as you're doing anything at a reasonable decibel level. His mood as of late almost rivals yours in terms of unpleasantness. He leans against the kitchen counter and bitches about the job, how it's a dead end and the higher ups are completely incompetent and he's going to lose his fucking mind if he has to set foot in that goddamn courthouse one more time, and you know he's not exaggerating. He's never been that good at standing up for himself. He would usually rather cave to someone else's demands than be assertive and risk getting into a conflict, and so he ends up letting himself get screwed over again and again.

You commiserate and nod and let him vent, both because you genuinely sympathize- and because if he's bitching about other people, it means the two of you aren't bitching at each other. There's been a bit of an unsteady truce between you ever since the fight you had on the day you went back to work, the whole _«it doesn't really matter to me»_ incident. It helps that the majority of your time together is spent sleeping. You still can't sleep on your own, so you're left to get by with a few hours before he has to head out and, if you're lucky, a quick nap when he gets home. When you're actually awake together, you give each other a wide berth, with conversations limited to a few safe topics. You sit on opposite ends of the couch and drink in near-silence, and sometimes you'll end up fooling around for a while but it's obvious that neither of you are really feeling it.

There's no doubt that he's miserable, and you are not all of it, but you are part of it, and there's nothing you can do about any of it. So you spend your sleepless nights packing up so he doesn't have to, and you cook like an insomniac housewife so he'll have something decent to eat when he comes home, and you silently tear yourself apart for being too goddamn needy to let him go.

* * *

You worry that spending so much time together this weekend will only serve to revive the same arguments in a different venue, but as you get farther away from the city, the air cools and the tension gets left behind with the heat that sizzles from the blacktop. When the first chords of Baba O'Riley blast through the car stereo speakers, you look over at him and he grins back at you in a way you had forgotten he was capable of. It was one of the first things you learned about him after you officially unofficially started seeing each other- that to him, proper road trip music meant anything with a chorus you could belt out, and that everyone in the car was expected to participate. You tried to explain to him that you don't sing. You barely lip sync. Even your humming is notoriously tone deaf. But he was not having this, so for him you sing. Quietly.

The passing scenery reminds you of last fall, driving this same road on a trip borne out of irritation and desperation, holding hands over the center console because everything was still new and full of possibilities and even a few inches between you was a distance too far. You had been trying to (re)consummate the relationship for weeks only to be thwarted at every attempt by the phone ringing or the exterminator at the door or a child having the mother of all meltdowns directly on the other side of the wall. Normally you would've just decided that you would need to be quicker about it, but you had been building up to this for months (on top of a dozen or so years) and goddamnit, you wanted to do this right. Maybe you were becoming a romantic in your old age, who knows. Whatever the reason may have been, when he mentioned that he had a place where the nearest neighbors were twenty minutes away and cell reception was patchy at best, you were practically out the door before he could finish his sentence.

Everything felt optimistic back then- an adjective you hadn't been able to use in relation to your own life for God knows how long. ("Things are looking up for 'ol Gil!" he had said, deeply disappointed when you didn't understand the Simpsons reference). As for right now, you aren't ready to go as far as to call it optimism, but the windows are rolled down and he's singing along to Carry On Wayward Son and when he reaches over and rubs your shoulder, you can honestly say you're content for the moment. There's no one else on the road for miles and this is how the two of you work best, feeling that it's only you and you have something the world can't touch. You're both misfits in your own way and by outward appearances, it shouldn't work, but it does. It just does.

* * *

The afternoon is a quiet one, but not in the way that was typical for you as of late. Maybe it's the change of scenery, maybe it's relief at being outside without feeling like there's a hairdryer blowing at full blast directly in your face, or maybe you've simply run out of things to fight about. You go on a long walk among trees that seem to brush against the clouds, holding hands and listening to stories of the childhood exploits of him and his siblings.

Frankly, you are surprised any of them survived to adulthood. You had been strictly a city child, where the dangers were in talking to strange men or not looking both ways, not in crashing snowmobiles and attracting the attention of bears.

He laughs at your remark. "There aren't bears around here. I think you'd have a better chance of seeing one walking down the sidewalk outside your apartment."

"Why would there be bears wandering the city?"

"Because they escaped from the zoo," he says, and whether he intended to or not, he couldn't have done a better imitation of Elliot's _«isn't it obvious?»_ voice if he tried. All he needed to do was add_ 'keep up, Benson'_ and stalk off to the coffeemaker to wait for you to chase after him and admit he was right.

There's a steep hill not far from the house, and at the bottom is a body of water that could only be called a lake if you were feeling especially generous. You navigate your way down carefully, nearly falling on your ass more than once while your boyfriend, who is probably part mountain goat, seems oblivious to your plight.

"Shit," you groan when you actually do fall- ironically enough, you make it all the way down safely only to trip over a rock. Brian finally turns around and snorts as he sees you glaring up at him.

"Yeah, you laugh now, but wait until I blow my knee out and you have to drag me all the way back up there."

"No way, I'm leaving you for the bears." He sticks his hand out, but you purposely ignore it until you are back up on your feet and then reach toward him, pulling him close to you while your forehead rests against his chest. You are sure he's thinking you must have hit your head when you fell and that's what triggered this unusual random bout of affection, but there's truly nothing to explain it other than it just feels_ right._ There's not much that does anymore, and you are tired of second guessing yourself every time something does, so you hold on tight and don't let go.

* * *

The two of you sit down on a fallen log and you gather up a handful of pebbles from around your feet. You start skipping them across the water the way he had taught you the last time you were here, almost hypnotized by the way they jump and then disappear below the surface.

"Do you feel like things are getting better?" he asks after several minutes of silence, and that is a loaded question if you ever heard one. You can tell he's asking honestly. He's not trying to goad you into a place there's no talking your way out of without a fight, but your hypervigilant mind instantly senses a trap regardless.

"Some days," you settle on saying, quiet enough that you can still hear the tiny splashing sounds of stones hitting water. "I think it's hard to tell when you're in the moment. It's one of those things where...when it happens, it'll catch me by surprise, like I'll be making dinner and realize that I haven't thought about it all day. Little stuff like that."

"Has that happened?"

You shake your head. "No. But sometimes...sometimes when it's _not_ the first thing I think of when I wake up, I feel like- okay, this is progress. Maybe I can do this."

"I know you can. No maybes," he says, pressing a kiss against your temple after a second's hesitation. You wonder how someone can have so much faith in you, far more than you do, even after all he's seen.

"Bri..." you start to say before sighing, shaking your head to signal that you're putting an end to this line of questioning.

"Just trust me. Things are going to start looking up for 'ol Gil."

"I thought you were supposed to be Gil," you complain, but you squeeze his hand as a silent thank you for knowing when to quit- which is progress in and of itself.

* * *

Later on, while you are watching him start a fire in the pit in front of the house ("Man, nature. It's beautiful. Let's torch some of it," he had decided), you shiver and realize you had left your hoodie down by the water. He offers to go retrieve it for you, but you assure him that you'll be fine and head back down the hill, leaving him to play with matches on his own.

You make it to the bottom without injury this time and step toward the water's edge, reaching down to test whether it truly is as cold as he claimed it was. He apparently was not kidding. It was all runoff from the winter snow, he said, and no amount of August sun was going to warm it to a tolerable level. They had held contests as kids to see who could tough it out for the longest, but no one had ever lasted more than a minute or so and it was obvious why.

Deciding you won't be missed for a bit as long as he can keep setting things on fire, you sit back down in the place you had been that afternoon and look to the sky, the smell of burning wood starting to waft down the hill. He had been so careful, making sure you were inside before he pulled out the matches because he knew how the sound of them being struck nauseated you. You wonder how much more he can take. It's clear now that there are three people in this relationship, and that is always a doomed number, even if one of them is only this shadowy uninvited presence that lingers over everything like the odor of stale cigarette smoke.

Maybe you are lying to yourself when you dare to hope that someday it might finally be just the two of you again. It's hard to imagine things getting better when you watch the sun sinking into the water, pink and orange streaking the sky, and your first instinct is to close your eyes and turn away. The sunset had been amazing like this on that awful night at the beach house, the evening's last rays shining through the trees and onto your face as you stared out the window. Anything to distract yourself from the monster in front of you and the gun he was holding, dragging up and down the already burnt skin on your inner thighs. He was grinning madly at you like he had just figured something out, and you had absolutely no fucking idea what was going to happen next but this was going to be bad. For all his faults, being secretive was not one of them. He liked to describe in great detail exactly what he was about to do to you, and his sudden reticence made you fear the worst, especially when he jabs you with the muzzle of the gun and you struggle to pull away from him but it's no use, he's got you trapped and nonono, _«why the hell you gotta be like that, huh? After how good I've been to you?»_, and there's screamingscreamingsomuchscreaming and it won't stop and ohgod it's you it's your voice and it won't stop and-

You force yourself to open your eyes and remember what Dr Lindstrom had told you. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. Focus on your surroundings. Concentrate on the present, on what you can see and hear right now.

The lake stretches out in front of you, clear and frigid, and you think of the afternoon when you came home from the hospital. You had sat down under the shower head and turned the knob all the way to the right, bitingly cold droplets raining down and not letting you forget where you were, that it was over and you had survived- at least in some sense. There wasn't enough water in the world for you to ever feel clean again, but you froze out what you could and prayed to a god you'll never believe in for the numbness to overtake you like an icy protective cocoon.

You know what you need to do now. Rolling up the legs of your jeans (as if that would make any difference), you toe off your shoes and clench your jaw in preparation for what is about to come. Quickly, before rational thought has time to set in, you run into the water the way Brian had described, waiting until it was about waist-high before diving underneath.

The chill doesn't hit you until you have stopped running and submerged yourself completely. Then it suddenly becomes all encompassing, every nerve ending in your body now awakened and firing and there is nothing else here but coldcoldcold. It is an exquisite agony, but it instantly strips away any remnants of the outside world. There is nothing to hide from, nothing to escape, because this is a place that _he_ cannot touch. The memories you battle with every second of the day and night have been left back on land because there is no room for them here. You let the water cradle you for another fraction of a second, long enough to commit the sensation of nothingness to memory, before you give in to instinct and let your limbs propel you to the surface.

It is a struggle to fight back a scream once your head is above water and you've taken that first giant gulp of air. All your muscles are quivering violently in a desperate attempt to warm up as you reach the rocky shore, not stopping to put on your shoes before you start sprinting up the hill. You have the mother of all ice cream headaches, and you still can't breathe in fully, and you have never felt so alive in your entire existence.

There are no words to adequately describe the expression on Brian's face when he looks up to see you soaked through to the skin and running toward him. "The fuck happened to you?"

"It was an impulse," is all you say, gesturing toward the house. "I'm gonna go get changed."

You can tell he thinks you have well and truly lost your mind. "I told you it was fucking cold!" he calls out as the screen door swings shut behind you.

* * *

"And so I'm halfway to the top of this tree, right, and then I look down at the ground and _shit_. Total panic. There's no way in hell I'm moving now. So my cousin gets the idea to go back to the house and get a ladder so he can rescue me like a cat...and that's where things start to get out of hand."

"Start to?" you repeat skeptically, reaching over to steal a sip of his shitty beer. You had joined him by the fire once you had dried off, and even though you can feel the warmth it radiates, there is still this residual chill lingering under your skin. He frowns every time you shiver, but you don't know how to explain that you don't want it to stop. You are alive and awake and you can _feel_ and there is no one on earth who can take that away from you now.

It's a bit of an awkward angle when you tilt your neck upward to kiss him from where you are sitting in between his legs, but his mouth is warm and his arms are wrapped around you protectively and you don't really notice anything beyond that. When you shift to try and find a better position, your back arches and your sweatshirt rides up a little, leaving a strip of bare skin underneath his hand. It's literally no more than a finger's width, but the surprise warmth on your cold skin causes you to let out this whimper that would be mortifying under any other circumstance.

He senses he may be onto something here and slowly his hand is creeping under your shirt until his palm is resting flat against your stomach. You're breathing faster now, short little gasps as he starts talking softly in the way he knows just kills you every time. His lips are barely brushing your earlobe, and it seems ridiculous that you feel so close to coming already until you remember that you haven't been touched like this all summer.

You groan when the side of his thumb brushes right underneath one of your breasts, but he just lets go of you and stands up, the fucking tease. "Inside," he says, and you follow obediently. He gives you a quick kiss on the cheek once you're back in the house, ignoring your disappointed frown as he walks away with a promise that he'll only be a minute, he's gonna shower because he smells like smoke.

The bathroom is tiny and windowless, with only a single working bulb above the sink to illuminate the darkness. You turn this thought over in your head a few times as you mentally replay your shower from earlier that evening- the first one you had been brave enough to attempt in months.

Mind made up, you wait until you hear the water running to make your move. He hears the door open and asks if everything's okay, and you assure him that you're fine as you undress quickly, not wanting to give your usual self-consciousness a chance to take hold.

The hot water feels prickly on your skin as you pull back the curtain and step into the tub. He hesitates for a second out of shock and then it is all a flurry of mouths and hands with you pressing yourself up against him, kissing him fiercely. He tells you that you're gorgeous, that you're so goddamn sexy, and you know he's only saying that because he can't see what the shadows are concealing, but for now you allow yourself to pretend. As long as he can't see, as long as the water beating down on you softens the roughness of the scars under his fingertips, you can almost forget.

Then he pinches one of your nipples between his fingers and there is no more 'almost' about it. He's got his other arm slung around your waist, holding you with your back against his chest so you can feel him sliding against your ass. You can barely hear anything above the roar of the water and your own moaning, but there's no mistaking the _missed you missed this missed you_ he's repeating as he moves his hand away from your breast, taking you by the shoulders and turning you around until you're backed against the wall.

Now he's got you on the edge of coming, shaking in anticipation. His hands are everywhere and his mouth is attacking your neck with open mouthed kisses and when the back of your head bumps against the tile it's too much and you can feel yourself slipping away. "Slow, slow," you choke out and he goes still, tilting your chin up with one finger when you try to squeeze your eyes shut.

"Look at me, babe. It's okay, you're okay. I've got you." You nod, the two of you watching each other as you fight to get your breathing under control. He doesn't move, close to you but not touching, quietly reassuring you until you lean against him and reach for his hand.

"I'm okay," you promise, calmer now even as your cheeks are still slightly flushed in anxious embarrassment. "Everything just got. Fuck."

"Intense," he supplies, and you nod again. You take a few more slow deep breaths until you're confident that you've completely returned to the present, safe and no longer being pulled into some past terror.

He hesitates when you go back to kissing him, the way he always does when this happens, but you think you are finally proving to him that there is a difference between _«I need to slow down for a minute»_ and _«get away from me, I'm done»_. You know you have won him over when you feel his fingers pressing on your hipbones in a way that will hopefully leave marks, deliberately grinding against you. His hand is where you want it at last, stroking cautiously, and you can tell he's surprised when he realizes how wet you are.

You reach toward him, wanting him to get off before you do because once it happens, you're pretty sure you're going to be far too gone to attend to such things. He keeps running his fingers back and forth over you and it's just the right rhythm, just the right amount of pressure, and he doesn't stop his exploration even as he's coming over your hand and stomach with a groan. You brace yourself by holding onto his shoulder as you slide two of your now-slick fingers inside yourself, open mouthed and eyes fixed on each other as you finally bring yourself over the edge.

Even though you insist on having a towel wrapped securely around you when it's time to get out of the shower, you don't bother to get dressed again, instead letting the towel fall onto the floor before you lazily climb into bed. You bury your face in the pillow and make sure to roll over onto your stomach- not out of any particular fondness for having your ass on display, but because you know that the only marks on your back were a few bruises that have long since healed.

There are noises coming from the kitchen, and you hope he isn't starting some late night culinary project because you've never seen one of those that ended well for him. "Get in here, I'm naked and lonely," you call out jokingly, laughing when he promises he'll be right there and he wasn't going to try cooking anything, honestly.

"You read my mind." You yawn, deciding to close your eyes for a minute while you wait for him to come back, and the last thing you remember is him kissing your bare shoulder as you drift off.

* * *

The next time you awaken, you notice three things in rapid succession- you are in an unfamiliar place, completely undressed, and with someone holding on to you. That in itself is terrifying enough, but then you realize he's hard against your thigh and your instinct to escape kicks in before you can stop to think.

You can hardly breathe once you make it into the bathroom. Once the door is securely locked behind you and you've checked it once, twice, you sit down on the closed toilet seat and sob into your hands, hoping to muffle the sound enough to keep him from waking up. It is so tiring, feeling like you might be moving towards some semblance of a normal life...and then without warning you're knocked down again and dragged back into the past. Back into your old apartment, hands cuffed together and _«your boyfriend's never gonna do it for you anymore after this»_ and he's yanking your head back to bite at your neck while his free hand is tugging at your pants yet again, _«you're afraid you'll like it, aren't you? I'll be the best you've ever had»_ and after he's finished you can taste yourself on his tongue when he climbs on top of you, kissing you roughly,_ «I've ruined you for anyone else, sweetheart, you wait and see»_ and there's nothing you can do but lie there and cry...

Still naked except for the towel you had hastily wrapped yourself in before you fled the bedroom, you peer down at yourself through tear-filled eyes. The dim lighting does nothing to camouflage the scars that litter your skin from your shoulders to your knees because you've already memorized the sight of them all. It goes beyond vanity, your hatred of each and every one, although that certainly factors in as well. They're a reminder of feeling dirty and used, and that feeling is never going to change. You're sure of it. It's so simple to tell others that it wasn't their fault, that they don't have to carry this misplaced shame, but it's another thing entirely when it's your own life and your own self-disgust.

You quickly throw on jeans and a hoodie and go out onto the front steps in the hope that getting some air might help you calm down. You're okay, you repeat to yourself silently. Just because your stomach twists when you think about last night, that doesn't mean you did anything you should be regretting now- it's a ridiculous notion. There's no reason why it was wrong to let yourself go. It was what you wanted in the moment, god knows you wanted it, and now you're just a little overwhelmed by all these emotions hitting you at once. You're okay, you just need to stop thinking. Stop confusing things. One is not like the other, and the past is in the past. Easy as that.

The screen door opens behind you and your posture instantly goes rigid. "Liv? Everything okay?"

"Yeah, fine," you say, hastily wiping at your eyes. "Just couldn't sleep and didn't want to wake you up."

"You've been crying," he points out.

No shit, you think, but you're too drained to do anything but shrug.

"Another dream?" You can see him cautiously reaching out to you out of the corner of your eye, giving you time to prepare, and yet when his hand brushes your arm you still recoil like you've been slapped.

"Don't," you snap, voice low and serious. "Just stay the hell away from me. I mean it."

He takes several steps back without protest and the tears well up in your eyes once more. You know he blames himself every time this happens, no matter how often you've promised it's nothing to do with him, and it only adds another layer of guilt to the mountain you already have.

Both of you stand there for a few minutes, silent and distant. You are so absorbed in your own mind, berating yourself for fucking up once again, that you don't even notice he's behind you until the smell of coffee eventually gets your attention.

"You're still here," you say, soft and surprised, because it doesn't make sense that he's stuck around for so long, today or any day. It's the reason your heart catches in your throat every time he texts to say that he's on his way home, this disbelief that someone would willingly keep coming back after all you've put him through when there's no end in sight. One day that text won't come, you know, and when that happens you will be the only one to blame.

Now it's his turn to shrug. "Yeah...y'know. Gotta keep the bears away."


End file.
